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The University of Minnesota Press gratefully
acknowledges translation assistance provided for this
book by the French Ministry of Culture and by the
National Endowment for the Humanities, an
independent federal agency.

Copyright © 1987 by the University of Minnesota Press All rights
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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Eleventh printing 2005

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Deleuze, Gilles.

[Mille plateaux. English]

A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia/Gilles

Deleuze, Felix Guattari; translation and foreword by Brian
Massumi. p. cm.

Translation of: Mille plateaux, v. 2 of Capitalisme et

schizophrenic.

A companion volume to Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and

schizophrenia.

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-8166-1401-6

ISBN 0-8166-1402-4 (pbk.)

1. Philosophy. I. Guattari, Felix. II. Title

B77.D413 1987
194-dcl9

87-18623

Originally published as Mille Plateaux, volume 2 of Capitalisme et
Schizophrenic © 1980 by Les Editions de Minuit, Paris.

Photo of Sylvano Bussoti, Five Pieces for Piano for David Tudor,
reproduced by permission of G. Ricordi, Milan, copyright © 1970
by G. Ricordi E.C. SPA; photo of Fernand Leger, Men in the
Cities, 1919, copyright © 1987 by ARS, N.Y./SPADEM; photo of
Paul Klee, Twittering Machine, 1922, reproduced by permission of
The Museum of Modern Art, N.Y., copyright © 1987 by
Cosmopress, Geneva.

The University of Minnesota
is an equal-opportunity
educator and employer.

Contents

Translator's Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy Brian Massumi

Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgments

xvi

Author's Note

1. Introduction: Rhizome

3 Root, radicle, and rhizome—Issues concerning books—The One
and the Multiple—Tree and rhizome—The geographical directions,
Orient, Occident, America—The misdeeds of the tree—What is a
plateau?

2. 1914: One or Several Wolves?

Neurosis and psychosis—For a theory of multiplicities—Packs—The

unconscious and the molecular

3. 10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think

It Is?)

Strata—Double articulation (segmentarity)—What constitutes the

unity of a stratum—Milieus—The diversity within a stratum: forms

and substances, epistrata and parastrata—Content and expression—

The diversity among strata—The molar and the molecular—Abstract

machine and assemblage: their comparative states—Metastrata

4. November 20, 1923: Postulates of Linguistics

The order-word—Indirect discourse—Order-words, acts, and incor-

vi □ CONTENTS

poreal transformations—Dates—Content and expression, and their

respective variables—The aspects of the assemblage—Constants, var-

iables, and continuous variation—Music—Style—Major and minor

—Becoming—Death and escape, figure and metamorphosis

5. 587 B.C.-A.D. 70: On Several Regimes of Signs

111

The signifying despotic regime—The passional subjective regime—

The two kinds of delusion and the problem of psychiatry—The

ancient history of the Jewish people—The line of flight and the

prophet—The face, turning away, and betrayal—The Book—The sys-

tem of subjectivity: consciousness and passion, Doubles—Domestic

squabble and office squabble—Redundancy—The figures of

deter-ritorialization—Abstract machine and diagram—The

generative, the transformational, the diagrammatic, and the machinic

6. November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without

Organs?

149

The body without organs, waves and intensities—The egg—

Masochism, courtly love, and the Tao—The strata and the plane of

consistency—Antonin Artaud—The art of caution—The three-body

problem—Desire, plane, selection, and composition

7. Year Zero: Faciality

167

White wall, black hole—The abstract machine of faciality—Body,

head, and face—Face and landscape—The courtly novel—Theorems

of deterritorialization—The face and Christ—The two figures of the

face: frontal view and profile, the turning away—Dismantling the face

8. 1874: Three Novellas, or "What Happened?"

192

The novella and the tale: the secret—The three lines—Break, crack,

and rupture—The couple, the double, and the clandestine

9. 1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity

208

Segmentarity, primitive and civilized—The molar and the molec-

ular—Fascism and totalitarianism—The segmented line and the

quantum flow—Gabriel Tarde—Masses and classes—The abstract

machine: mutation and overcoding—What is a power center?—The

three lines and the dangers of each—Fear, clarity, power, and death

10. 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-

Imperceptible . ..

232

Becoming—Three aspects of sorcery: multiplicity; the Anomalous, or

the Outsider; transformations—Individuation and Haecceity: five

o'clock in the evening—Longitude, latitude, and the plane of

consistency—The two planes, or the two conceptions of the plane—

CONTENTS □ vii

Becoming-woman, becoming-child, becoming-animal,
becoming-molecular: zones of proximity—Becoming
imperceptible—The secret—Majority, minority, minoritarian—The
minoritarian character and dissymmetry of becoming: double
becoming—Point and line, memory and becoming—Becoming and
block—The opposition between punctual systems and multilinear
systems—Music, painting, and becomings—The refrain—Theorems
of deterritorialization continued—Becoming versus imitation

11. 1837: Of the Refrain

310

In the dark, at home, toward the world—Milieus and rhythm—The
placard and the territory—Expression as style: rhythmic faces,
melodic landscapes—Bird song—Territoriality, assemblages, and
interassemblages—The territory and the earth, the Natal—The prob-
lem of consistency—Machinic assemblage and abstract machine—
Classicism and milieus—Romanticism, the territory, the earth, and
the people—Modern art and the cosmos—Form and substance, forces
and material—Music and refrains; the great and the small refrain

12. 1227: Treatise on Nomadology:—The War Machine

351

The two poles of the State—The irreducibility and exteriority of the
war machine—The man of war—Minor and major: the minor
sciences—The body and esprit de corps—Thought, the State, and
nomadology—First aspect: the war machine and nomad space—
Second aspect: the war machine and the composition of people, the
nomad number—Third aspect: the war machine and nomad affects
—Free action and work—The nature of assemblages: tools and signs,
arms and jewelry—Metallurgy, itinerancy, and nomadism—The
machinic phylum and technological lineages—Smooth space, stri-
ated space, holey space—The war machine and war: the complexities
of the relation

13. 7000 B.C.: Apparatus of Capture

424

The paleolithic State—Primitive groups, towns, States, and world-
wide organizations—Anticipate, ward off—The meaning of the word
"last" (marginalism)—Exchange and stock—Capture: landownership
(rent), fiscal organization (taxation), public works (profit)—The prob-
lem of violence—The forms of the State and the three ages of Law—
Capitalism and the State—Subjection and enslavement—Issues in
axiomatics

14. 1440: The Smooth and the Striated

474

The technological model (textile)—The musical model—The mari-

Translator's Foreword:

Pleasures of Philosophy

Brian Massumi

This is a book that speaks of many things, of ticks and quilts and fuzzy sub-
sets and noology and political economy. It is difficult to know how to
approach it. What do you do with a book that dedicates an entire chapter to
music and animal behavior—and then claims that it isn't a chapter? That
presents itself as a network of "plateaus" that are precisely dated, but can
be read in any order? That deploys a complex technical vocabulary drawn
from a wide range of disciplines in the sciences, mathematics, and the
humanities, but whose authors recommend that you read it as you would
listen to a record?

"Philosophy, nothing but philosophy."

Of a bastard line.

The annals of official philosophy are populated by "bureaucrats of pure

reason" who speak in "the shadow of the despot" and are in historical com-
plicity with the State.

They invent "a properly spiritual... absolute State that

... effectively functions in the mind." Theirs is the discourse of sovereign
judgment, of stable subjectivity legislated by "good" sense, of rocklike iden-
tity, "universal" truth, and (white male) justice. "Thus the exercise of their
thought is in conformity with the aims of the real State, with the dominant sig-
nifications, and with the requirements of the established order."

Gilles Deleuze was schooled in that philosophy. The titles of his earliest

□ TRANSLATOR'S FOREWORD

books read like a Who's Who of philosophical giants. "What got me by dur-

ing that period was conceiving of the history of philosophy as a kind of

ass-fuck, or, what amounts to the same thing, an immaculate conception.

I imagined myself approaching an author from behind and giving him a child

that would indeed be his but would nonetheless be monstrous."

Hegel is

absent, being too despicable to merit even a mutant offspring.

To Kant he

dedicated an affectionate study of "an enemy." Yet much of positive value

came of Deleuze's flirtation with the greats. He discovered an orphan line of

thinkers who were tied by no direct descendance but were united in their

opposition to the State philosophy that would nevertheless accord them

minor positions in its canon. Between Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza,

Nietzsche, and Bergson there exists a "secret link constituted by the critique

of negativity, the cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority, the exteriority of

forces and relations, the denunciation of power."

Deleuze's first major

statements written in his own voice, Difference et repetition (1968) and
Logique du sens (1969), cross-fertilized that line of "nomad" thought with

contemporary theory. The ferment of the student-worker revolt of May 1968

and the reassessment it prompted of the role of the intellectual in society

led

him to disclaim the "ponderous academic apparatus"

still in evidence in

those works. However, many elements of the "philosophy of difference" they

elaborated were transfused into a continuing collaboration, of which A
Thousand Plateaus is the most recent product.

Felix Guattari is a practicing psychoanalyst and lifelong political activ-

ist. He has worked since the mid-1950s at La Borde, an experimental psy-

chiatric clinic founded by Lacanian analyst Jean Oury. Guattari himself

was among Lacan's earliest trainees, and although he never severed his ties

with Lacan's Freudian School the group therapy practiced at La Borde

took him in a very different direction. The aim at La Borde was to abolish

the hierarchy between doctor and patient in favor of an interactive group

dynamic that would bring the experiences of both to full expression in such

a way as to produce a collective critique of the power relations in society as

a whole. "The central perspective is... to promote human relations that do

not automatically fall into roles or stereotypes but open onto fundamental

relations of a metaphysical kind that bring out the most radical and basic

alienations of madness or neurosis"

and channel them into revolutionary

practice. Guattari collaborated beginning in 1960 on group projects dedi-

cated to developing this radical "institutional psychotherapy,"

and later

entered an uneasy alliance with the international antipsychiatry move-

ment spearheaded by R.D. Laing in England and Franco Basaglia in Italy.

As Lacanian schools of psychoanalysis gained ground against psychiatry,

the contractual Oedipal relationship between the analyst and the transfer-

ence-bound analysand became as much of a target for Guattari as the legal

RANSLATOR'S FOREWORD D xi

bondage of the institutionalized patient in the conventional State hospital.

He came to occupy the same position in relation to psychoanalysis as he

had all along in relation to the parties of the left: an ultra-opposition within

the opposition. His antihierarchical leanings made him a precursor to the

events of May 1968 and an early partisan of the social movements that

grew from them, including feminism and the gay rights movement.

Anti-Oedipus (1972),

his first book with Deleuze, gave philosophical

weight to his convictions and created one of the intellectual sensations of

postwar France with its spirited polemics against State-happy or pro-party

versions of Marxism and school-building strains of psychoanalysis,

which separately and in various combinations represented the dominant

intellectual currents of the time (in spite of the fundamentally anarchist

nature of the spontaneous popular uprisings that had shaken the world in

1968). "The most tangible result of Anti-Oedipus was that it short-circuited

the connection between psychoanalysis and the far left parties," in which

he and Deleuze saw the potential for a powerful new bureaucracy of

analytic reason.

For many French intellectuals, the hyperactivism of post-May gave way

to a mid-seventies slump, then a return to religion (Tel Quel) or political

conservatism (the Nouveaux Philosophes) in a foreshadowing of the

Reagan eighties. Deleuze and Guattari never recanted. Nor did they sim-

ply revive the polemics. A Thousand Plateaus (1980), written over a

seven-year period, was billed as a sequel to Anti-Oedipus and shares its

subtitle, Capitalism and Schizophrenia. But it constitutes a very different

project. It is less a critique than a positive exercise in the affirmative

"nomad" thought called for in Anti-Oedipus.

"State philosophy" is another word for the representational thinking

that has characterized Western metaphysics since Plato, but has suffered

an at least momentary setback during the last quarter century at the hands

of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and poststructuralist theory gener-

ally. As described by Deleuze,

it reposes on a double identity: of the thinking

subject, and of the concepts it creates and to which it lends its own

presumed attributes of sameness and constancy. The subject, its concepts,

and also the objects in the world to which the concepts are applied have a

shared, internal essence: the self-resemblance at the basis of identity. Rep-

resentational thought is analogical; its concern is to establish a correspon-

dence between these symmetrically structured domains. The faculty of

judgment is the policeman of analogy, assuring that each of the three terms

is honestly itself, and that the proper correspondences obtain. In thought

its end is truth, in action justice. The weapons it wields in their pursuit are

limitative distribution (the determination of the exclusive set of properties

possessed by each term in contradistinction to the others: logos, law) and

xii □ TRANSLATOR'S FOREWORD

hierarchical ranking (the measurement of the degree of perfection of a

term's self-resemblance in relation to a supreme standard, man, god, or

gold: value, morality). The modus operandi is negation: x = x = noty. Iden-

tity, resemblance, truth, justice, and negation. The rational foundation for

order. The established order, of course: philosophers have traditionally

been employees of the State. The collusion between philosophy and the

State was most explicitly enacted in the first decade of the nineteenth cen-

tury with the foundation of the University of Berlin, which was to become

the model for higher learning throughout Europe and in the United States.

The goal laid out for it by Wilhelm von Humboldt (based on proposals by

Fichte and Schleiermacher) was the "spiritual and moral training of the

nation," to be achieved by "deriving everything from an original principle"

(truth), by "relating everything to an ideal" (justice), and by "unifying this

principle and this ideal in a single Idea" (the State). The end product would

be "a fully legitimated subject of knowledge and society"

—each mind an

analogously organized mini-State morally unified in the supermind of the

State. Prussian mind-meld.

More insidious than the well-known practi-

cal cooperation between university and government (the burgeoning mili-

tary funding of research) is its philosophical role in the propagation of the

form of representational thinking itself, that "properly spiritual absolute

State" endlessly reproduced and disseminated at every level of the social

fabric. Deconstruction-influenced feminists such as Helene Cixous and

Luce Irigaray have attacked it under the name "phallogocentrism" (what

the most privileged model of rocklike identity is goes without saying). In

the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari describe it

as the "arborescent model" of thought (the proudly erect tree under whose

spreading boughs latter-day Platos conduct their class).

"Nomad thought" does not immure itself in the edifice of an ordered

interiority; it moves freely in an element of exteriority. It does not repose

on identity; it rides difference. It does not respect the artificial division

between the three domains of representation, subject, concept, and being;

it replaces restrictive analogy with a conductivity that knows no bounds.

The concepts it creates do not merely reflect the eternal form of a legislat-

ing subject, but are defined by a communicable force in relation to which

their subject, to the extent that they can be said to have one, is only secon-

dary. They do not reflect upon the world but are immersed in a changing

state of things. A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of

reason. Or it can be thrown through the window. What is the subject of the

brick? The arm that throws it? The body connected to the arm? The brain

encased in the body? The situation that brought brain and body to such a

juncture? All and none of the above. What is its object? The window? The

edifice? The laws the edifice shelters? The class and other power relations

TRANSLATOR'S FOREWORD □ xiii

encrusted in the laws? All and none of the above. "What interests us are the

circumstances."

Because the concept in its unrestrained usage is a set of

circumstances, at a volatile juncture. It is a vector: the point of application

of a force moving through a space at a given velocity in a given direction.

The concept has no subject or object other than itself. It is an act. Nomad

thought replaces the closed equation of representation, x = x = noty (I = I

= not you) with an open equation: ... + y + z + a + ...(...+ arm + brick +

window + ...). Rather than analyzing the world into discrete components,

reducing their manyness to the One of identity, and ordering them by rank,

it sums up a set of disparate circumstances in a shattering blow. It synthe-

sizes a multiplicity of elements without effacing their heterogeneity or hin-

dering their potential for future rearranging (to the contrary). The modus

operandi of nomad thought is affirmation, even when its apparent object is

negative. Force is not to be confused with power. Force arrives from outside

to break constraints and open new vistas. Power builds walls.

The space of nomad thought is qualitatively different from State space.

Air against earth. State space is "striated," or gridded. Movement in it is

confined as by gravity to a horizontal plane, and limited by the order of

that plane to preset paths between fixed and identifiable points. Nomad

space is "smooth," or open-ended. One can rise up at any point and move

to any other. Its mode of distribution is the nomos: arraying oneself in an

open space (hold the street), as opposed to the logos of entrenching oneself

in a closed space (hold the fort).

A Thousand Plateaus is an effort to construct a smooth space of

thought. It is not the first such attempt. Like State philosophy, nomad

thought goes by many names. Spinoza called it "ethics." Nietzsche called

it the "gay science." Artaud called it "crowned anarchy." To Maurice

Blanchot, it is the "space of literature." To Foucault, "outside thought."

In this book, Deleuze and Guattari employ the terms "pragmatics" and

"schizoanalysis," and in the introduction describe a rhizome network

strangling the roots of the infamous tree. One of the points of the book is

that nomad thought is not confined to philosophy. Or that the kind of phi-

losophy it is comes in many forms. Filmmakers and painters are philo-

sophical thinkers to the extent that they explore the potentials of their

respective mediums and break away from the beaten paths.

On a strictly

formal level, it is mathematics and music that create the smoothest of the

smooth spaces.

In fact, Deleuze and Guattari would probably be more

inclined to call philosophy music with content than music a rarefied form

of philosophy.

Which returns to our opening question. How should A Thousand Pla-

teaus be played? When you buy a record there are always cuts that leave you

cold. You skip them. You don't approach a record as a closed book that you

iv D TRANSLATOR'S FOREWORD

have to take or leave. Other cuts you may listen to over and over again. They

follow you. You find yourself humming them under your breath as you go

about your daily business.

A Thousand Plateaus is conceived as an open system.

It does not pre-

tend to have the final word. The authors' hope, however, is that elements of

it will stay with a certain number of its readers and will weave into the mel-

ody of their everyday lives.

Each "plateau" is an orchestration of crashing bricks extracted from a

variety of disciplinary edifices. They carry traces of their former emplace-

ment, which give them a spin defining the arc of their vector. The vectors

are meant to converge at a volatile juncture, but one that is sustained, as an

open equilibrium of moving parts each with its own trajectory. The word

"plateau" comes from an essay by Gregory Bateson on Balinese culture, in

which he found a libidinal economy quite different from the West's orgas-

mic orientation.

In Deleuze and Guattari, a plateau is reached when cir-

cumstances combine to bring an activity to a pitch of intensity that is not

automatically dissipated in a climax. The heightening of energies is sus-

tained long enough to leave a kind of afterimage of its dynamism that can

be reactivated or injected into other activities, creating a fabric of intensive

states between which any number of connecting routes could exist. Each

section of A Thousand Plateaus tries to combine conceptual bricks in such

a way as to construct this kind of intensive state in thought. The way the

combination is made is an example of what Deleuze and Guattari call

consistency—not in the sense of a homogeneity, but as a holding together

of disparate elements (also known as a "style").

A style in this sense, as a

dynamic holding together or mode of composition, is not something lim-

ited to writing. Filmmakers, painters, and musicians have their styles,

mathematicians have theirs, rocks have style, and so do tools, and technol-

ogies, and historical periods, even—especially—punctual events. Each

section is dated, because each tries to reconstitute a dynamism that has

existed in other mediums at other times. The date corresponds to the point

at which that particular dynamism found its purest incarnation in matter,

the point at which it was freest from interference from other modes and

rose to its highest degree of intensity. That never lasts more than a flash,

because the world rarely leaves room for uncommon intensity, being in

large measure an entropic trashbin of outworn modes that refuse to die.

Section 12, for example, the "Treatise on Nomadology," is dated 1227

because that is when the nomad war machine existed for a moment in its

pure form on the vacant smooth spaces of the steppes of Inner Asia.

The reader is invited to follow each section to the plateau that rises from

the smooth space of its composition, and to move from one plateau to the

next at pleasure. But it is just as good to ignore the heights. You can take a

RANSLATOR'S FOREWORD □ xv

concept that is particularly to your liking and jump with it to its next

appearance. They tend to cycle back. Some might call that repetitious.

Deleuze and Guattari call it a refrain.

Most of all, the reader is invited to lift a dynamism out of the book

entirely, and incarnate it in a foreign medium, whether it be painting or

politics. The authors steal from other disciplines with glee, but they are

more than happy to return the favor. Deleuze's own image for a concept is

not a brick, but a "tool box."

He calls his kind of philosophy "pragmatics"

because its goal is the invention of concepts that do not add up to a system

of belief or an architecture of propositions that you either enter or you

don't, but instead pack a potential in the way a crowbar in a willing hand

envelops an energy of prying.

The best way of all to approach the book is to read it as a challenge: to pry

open the vacant spaces that would enable you to build your life and those of

the people around you into a plateau of intensity that would leave afterim-

ages of its dynamism that could be reinjected into still other lives, creating

a fabric of heightened states between which any number, the greatest num-

ber, of connecting routes would exist. Some might call that promiscuous.

Deleuze and Guattari call it revolution.

The question is not: is it true? But: does it work? What new thoughts

does it make it possible to think? What new emotions does it make it possi-

ble to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open in the body?

The answer for some readers, perhaps most, will be "none." If that hap-

pens, it's not your tune. No problem. But you would have been better off

buying a record.

Notes on the Translation

and

Acknowledgments

AFFECT

AFFECTION

Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment

in Deleuze and Guattari). L 'affect (Spinoza's affectus) is an ability to affect
and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage
from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an
augmentation or diminution in that body's capacity to act. L'affection
(Spinoza's affectio) is each such state considered as an encounter between
the affected body and a second, affecting, body (with body taken in its
broadest possible sense to include "mental" or ideal bodies).

DRAW

In A Thousand Plateaus, to draw is an act of creation. What is

drawn (the Body without Organs, the plane of consistency, a line of flight)
does not preexist the act of drawing. The French word tracer captures this
better: It has all the graphic connotations of "to draw" in English, but can
also mean to blaze a trail or open a road. "To trace" {decalquer), on the
other hand, is to copy something from a model.

FLIGHT

ESCAPE

Both words translate fuite, which has a different range

of meanings than either of the English terms. Fuite covers not only the act
of fleeing or eluding but also flowing, leaking, and disappearing into the
distance (the vanishing point in a painting is a point de fuite). It has no rela-
tion to flying.

OTES ON THE TRANSLATION AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS □ xvii

MILIEU. In French, milieu means "surroundings," "medium" (as in

chemistry), and "middle." In the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari,
"milieu" should be read as a technical term combining all three meanings.

PLANE

The word plan designates both a "plane" in the geometrical sense

and a "plan." The authors use it primarily in the first sense. Where both
meanings seem to be present (as in discussions of the, plan d'organisatori)
"plan(e)" has been used in the translation.

POWER. Two words for "power" exist in French, puissance and pouvoir.

In Deleuze and Guattari, they are associated with very different concepts
(although the terminological distinction is not consistently observed).
Puissance refers to a range of potential. It has been defined by Deleuze as a
"capacity for existence," "a capacity to affect or be affected," a capacity to
multiply connections that may be realized by a given "body" to varying
degrees in different situations. It may be thought of as a scale of intensity or
fullness of existence (or a degree on such a scale), analogous to the capacity
of a number to be raised to a higher "power." It is used in the French trans-
lation of Nietzsche's term "will to power." Like its English counterpart, it
has an additional mathematical usage, designating the number of elements
in a finite or infinite set. Here, puissance pertains to the virtual (the plane
of consistency), pouvoir to the actual (the plane of organization). The
authors use pouvoir in a sense very close to Foucault's, as an instituted and
reproducible relation of force, a selective concretization of potential. Both
puissance and pouvoir have been translated here as "power," since the dis-
tinction between the concepts is usually clear from the context. The French
terms have been added in parentheses where confusion might arise, and in
occasional passages where puissance is rendered as "potential."

PROCESS

PROCEEDING

The authors employ two words normally trans-

lated as "process." Processus in their usage is the more general of the two,
covering both the stratified and destratified dimensions of an occurrence.
Proces pertains only to the stratification. In standard French, proces also
means "trial" (as in the title of the Kafka novel). Deleuze and Guattari
exploit this polysemy as a way of emphasizing the role of organizations of
social power and regimes of signs in operations constitutive of the subject,
or proces de subjectivation. Proces is usually (once again, there is slippage in
their usage) translated as "proceeding," despite the occasional awkward-
ness this produces in English, in an attempt to preserve both associations: a
process, or way of proceeding, and a legal proceeding, or trial. Processus is
always "process."

SELF. Both Moi and Soi have usually been translated as "Self," with the

French in brackets. Soi is the self in its broadest sense, but as a neuter
third-person pronoun implies an impersonality at the basis of the self.
Moi is a

viii D NOTES ON THE TRANSLATION AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

more restricted concept: the "me" as subject of enunciation for the "I" (je)

as subject of the statement. It is also the French term for the Freudian ego.

SIGNIFIANCE/INTERPRETANCE. I have followed the increasingly com-

mon practice of importing signifiance and interpr'etance into English with-

out modification. In Deleuze and Guattari these terms refer respectively to

the syntagmatic and paradigmatic processes of language as a "signifying

regime of signs." They are borrowed from Benveniste ("signifying capac-

ity" and "interpretative capacity" are the English translations used in

Benveniste's work).

STATEMENT

Enonce (often "utterance") has been translated here as

"statement," in keeping with the choice of the English translators of

Foucault, to whose conception Deleuze and Guattari's is closest. "Enunci-

ation" is used for enonciation.

TRAIT. The word trait has a range of meanings not covered by any single

word in English. Literally, it refers to a graphic drawing, and to the act of

drawing a line. Abstractly, it is the purely graphic element. Figuratively, it

is an identifying mark (a feature, or trait in the English sense), or any act

constituting a mark or sign. In linguistics, "distinctive features" {traits
distinctifs or traits pertinents) are the elementary units of language that

combine to form a phoneme. Trait also refers to a projectile, especially an

arrow, and to the act of throwing a projectile. Here, "trait" has been

retained in all but narrowly linguistic contexts.

GENDER-BIASED

USAGE

has been largely eliminated through

plural-ization or the use of male and female pronouns. However, where

Deleuze and Guattari seem deliberately to be using "man" to designate a

socially constructed, patriarchal standard of human behavior applied to

both men and women, the masculine generic has been retained.

* * *

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. I would like to express my gratitude to the

National Endowment for the Humanities and the French Ministry of Cul-

ture for their generous assistance, without which this translation would not

have been possible, and to the authors for their patience in answering my

questions. Winnie Berman, Ken Dean, Nannie Doyle, Shoshana Felman,

Jim Fleming, Robert Hurley, Fredric Jameson, Sylvere Lotringer, Susan

McClary, Giorgio Passerone, Paul Patton, Dana Polan, Mary Quaintance,

Michael Ryan, Lianne Sullivan, Susan Yazijian, and Caveh Zahedi pro-

vided much-appreciated aid and advice. Glenn Hendler likes to see his

name in print.

I consulted the following translations: "Rhizome" (first version), trans.

Paul Foss and Paul Patton, Ideology and Consciousness, no. 8 (Spring 1981,

D INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on

the contrary, of acceleration and rupture. All this, lines and measurable

speeds, constitutes an assemblage. A book is an assemblage of this kind,

and as such is unattributable. It is a multiplicity—but we don't know yet

what the multiple entails when it is no longer attributed, that is, after it has

been elevated to the status of a substantive. One side of a machinic assem-

blage faces the strata, which doubtless make it a kind of organism, or signi-

fying totality, or determination attributable to a subject; it also has a side

facing a body without organs, which is continually dismantling the organ-

ism, causing asignifying particles or pure intensities to pass or circulate,

and attributing to itself subjects that it leaves with nothing more than a

name as the trace of an intensity. What is the body without organs of a

book? There are several, depending on the nature of the lines considered,

their particular grade or density, and the possibility of their converging on

a "plane of consistency" assuring their selection. Here, as elsewhere, the

units of measure are what is essential: quantify writing. There is no differ-

ence between what a book talks about and how it is made. Therefore a book

also has no object. As an assemblage, a book has only itself, in connection

with other assemblages and in relation to other bodies without organs. We

will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier; we will not look

for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with, in con-

nection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in

which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed, and

with what bodies without organs it makes its own converge. A book exists

only through the outside and on the outside. A book itself is a little

machine; what is the relation (also measurable) of this literary machine to a

war machine, love machine, revolutionary machine, etc.—and an abstract
machine that sweeps them along? We have been criticized for overquoting

literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other

machine the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in

order to work. Kleist and a mad war machine, Kafka and a most extraordi-

nary bureaucratic machine . . . (What if one became animal or plant
through literature, which certainly does not mean literarily? Is it not first

through the voice that one becomes animal?) Literature is an assemblage.

It has nothing to do with ideology. There is no ideology and never has been.

All we talk about are multiplicities, lines, strata and segmentarities, lines

of flight and intensities, machinic assemblages and their various types,

bodies without organs and their construction and selection, the plane of

consistency, and in each case the units of measure. Stratometers,
deleometers, BwO units of density, BwO units of convergence: Not only do

these constitute a quantification of writing, but they define writing as

always the measure of something else. Writing has nothing to do with

NTRODUCTION: RHIZOME □ 5

signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to

come.

A first type of book is the root-book. The tree is already the image of the

world, or the root the image of the world-tree. This is the classical book, as

noble, signifying, and subjective organic interiority (the strata of the book).

The book imitates the world, as art imitates nature: by procedures specific

to it that accomplish what nature cannot or can no longer do. The law of the

book is the law of reflection, the One that becomes two. How could the law

of the book reside in nature, when it is what presides over the very division

between world and book, nature and art? One becomes two: whenever we

encounter this formula, even stated strategically by Mao or understood in

the most "dialectical" way possible, what we have before us is the most clas-

sical and well reflected, oldest, and weariest kind of thought. Nature

doesn't work that way: in nature, roots are taproots with a more multiple,

lateral, and circular system of ramification, rather than a dichotomous

one. Thought lags behind nature. Even the book as a natural reality is a tap-

root, with its pivotal spine and surrounding leaves. But the book as a spiri-

tual reality, the Tree or Root as an image, endlessly develops the law of the

One that becomes two, then of the two that become four. . . Binary logic is

the spiritual reality of the root-tree. Even a discipline as "advanced" as lin-

guistics retains the root-tree as its fundamental image, and thus remains

wedded to classical reflection (for example, Chomsky and his grammatical

trees, which begin at a point S and proceed by dichotomy). This is as much

as to say that this system of thought has never reached an understanding of

multiplicity: in order to arrive at two following a spiritual method it must

assume a strong principal unity. On the side of the object, it is no doubt pos-

sible, following the natural method, to go directly from One to three, four,

or five, but only if there is a strong principal unity available, that of the piv-

otal taproot supporting the secondary roots. That doesn't get us very far.

The binary logic of dichotomy has simply been replaced by biunivocal rela-

tionships between successive circles. The pivotal taproot provides no bet-

ter understanding of multiplicity than the dichotomous root. One operates

in the object, the other in the subject. Binary logic and biunivocal relation-

ships still dominate psychoanalysis (the tree of delusion in the Freudian

interpretation of Schreber's case), linguistics, structuralism, and even

information science.

The radicle-system, or fascicular root, is the second figure of the book,

to which our modernity pays willing allegiance. This time, the principal

root has aborted, or its tip has been destroyed; an immediate, indefinite

multiplicity of secondary roots grafts onto it and undergoes a flourishing

development. This time, natural reality is what aborts the principal root,

but the root's unity subsists, as past or yet to come, as possible. We must ask

6 D INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

if reflexive, spiritual reality does not compensate for this state of things by

demanding an even more comprehensive secret unity, or a more extensive

totality. Take William Burroughs's cut-up method: the folding of one text

onto another, which constitutes multiple and even adventitious roots (like

a cutting), implies a supplementary dimension to that of the texts under

consideration. In this supplementary dimension of folding, unity contin-

ues its spiritual labor. That is why the most resolutely fragmented work can

also be presented as the Total Work or Magnum Opus. Most modern meth-

ods for making series proliferate or a multiplicity grow are perfectly valid

in one direction, for example, a linear direction, whereas a unity of

totalization asserts itself even more firmly in another, circular or cyclic,

dimension. Whenever a multiplicity is taken up in a structure, its growth is

offset by a reduction in its laws of combination. The abortionists of unity

are indeed angel makers, doctores angelici, because they affirm a properly

angelic and superior unity. Joyce's words, accurately described as having

"multiple roots," shatter the linear unity of the word, even of language,

only to posit a cyclic unity of the sentence, text, or knowledge. Nietzsche's

aphorisms shatter the linear unity of knowledge, only to invoke the cyclic

unity of the eternal return, present as the nonknown in thought. This is as

much as to say that the fascicular system does not really break with dual-

ism, with the complementarity between a subject and an object, a natural

reality and a spiritual reality: unity is consistently thwarted and obstructed

in the object, while a new type of unity triumphs in the subject. The world

has lost its pivot; the subject can no longer even dichotomize, but accedes

to a higher unity, of ambivalence or overdetermination, in an always sup-

plementary dimension to that of its object. The world has become chaos,

but the book remains the image of the world: radicle-chaosmos rather than

root-cosmos. A strange mystification: a book all the more total for being

fragmented. At any rate, what a vapid idea, the book as the image of the

world. In truth, it is not enough to say, "Long live the multiple," difficult as

it is to raise that cry. No typographical, lexical, or even syntactical clever-

ness is enough to make it heard. The multiple must be made, not by always

adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of

sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available—

always n - 1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always sub-

tracted). Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted; write

at n - 1 dimensions. A system of this kind could be called a rhizome. A rhi-

zome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles.

Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots or radicles may be

rhizomorphic in other respects altogether: the question is whether plant

life in its specificity is not entirely rhizomatic. Even some animals are, in

their pack form. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all of their func-

INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME □ 7

tions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout. The rhizome

itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all

directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers. When rats swarm over each

other. The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass,

or the weed. Animal and plant, couchgrass is crabgrass. We get the distinct

feeling that we will convince no one unless we enumerate certain approxi-

mate characteristics of the rhizome.

1 and 2. Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhi-

zome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very differ-

ent from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order. The linguistic

tree on the Chomsky model still begins at a point S and proceeds by dichot-

omy. On the contrary, not every trait in a rhizome is necessarily linked to a

linguistic feature: semiotic chains of every nature are connected to very

diverse modes of coding (biological, political, economic, etc.) that bring

into play not only different regimes of signs but also states of things of dif-

fering status. Collective assemblages of enunciation function directly

within machinic assemblages; it is not impossible to make a radical break

between regimes of signs and their objects. Even when linguistics claims to

confine itself to what is explicit and to make no presuppositions about lan-

guage, it is still in the sphere of a discourse implying particular modes of

assemblage and types of social power. Chomsky's grammaticality, the cate-

gorical S symbol that dominates every sentence, is more fundamentally a

marker of power than a syntactic marker: you will construct grammatically

correct sentences, you will divide each statement into a noun phrase and a

verb phrase (first dichotomy. . .). Our criticism of these linguistic models

is not that they are too abstract but, on the contrary, that they are not

abstract enough, that they do not reach the abstract machine that connects

a language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements, to collec-

tive assemblages of enunciation, to a whole micropolitics of the social

field. A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic

chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sci-

ences, and social struggles. A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating

very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic,

gestural, and cognitive: there is no language in itself, nor are there any lin-

guistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized

languages. There is no ideal speaker-listener, any more than there is a

homogeneous linguistic community. Language is, in Weinreich's words,

"an essentially heterogeneous reality."

There is no mother tongue, only a

power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity.

Language stabilizes around a parish, a bishopric, a capital. It forms a bulb.

It evolves by subterranean stems and flows, along river valleys or train

tracks; it spreads like a patch of oil.

It is always possible to break a language

□ INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

down into internal structural elements, an undertaking not fundamentally

different from a search for roots. There is always something genealogical

about a tree. It is not a method for the people. A method of the rhizome

type, on the contrary, can analyze language only by decentering it onto

other dimensions and other registers. A language is never closed upon

itself, except as a function of impotence.

3. Principle of multiplicity: it is only when the multiple is effectively

treated as a substantive, "multiplicity," that it ceases to have any relation to

the One as subject or object, natural or spiritual reality, image and world.

Multiplicities are rhizomatic, and expose arborescent

pseudomulti-plicities for what they are. There is no unity to serve as a pivot

in the object, or to divide in the subject. There is not even the unity to abort

in the object or "return" in the subject. A multiplicity has neither subject

nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot

increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature (the laws

of combination therefore increase in number as the multiplicity grows).

Puppet strings, as a rhizome or multiplicity, are tied not to the supposed

will of an artist or puppeteer but to a multiplicity of nerve fibers, which

form another puppet in other dimensions connected to the first: "Call the

strings or rods that move the puppet the weave. It might be objected that
its multiplicity resides in the person of the actor, who projects it into the

text. Granted; but the actor's nerve fibers in turn form a weave. And they

fall through the gray matter, the grid, into the undifferentiated... . The

interplay approximates the pure activity of weavers attributed in myth to

the Fates or Norns."

An assemblage is precisely this increase in the

dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it

expands its connections. There are no points or positions in a rhizome,

such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines. When

Glenn Gould speeds up the performance of a piece, he is not just displaying

virtuosity, he is transforming the musical points into lines, he is making the

whole piece proliferate. The number is no longer a universal concept

measuring elements according to their emplacement in a given dimension,

but has itself become a multiplicity that varies according to the

dimensions considered (the primacy of the domain over a complex of

numbers attached to that domain). We do not have units (unites) of

measure, only multiplicities or varieties of measurement. The notion of

unity {unite) appears only when there is a power takeover in the

multiplicity by the signifier or a corresponding subjectification

proceeding: This is the case for a pivot-unity forming the basis for a set

of biunivocal relationships between objective elements or points, or for the

One that divides following the law of a binary logic of differentiation in the

subject. Unity always operates in an empty dimension supplementary to

that of the system considered (overcoding).

The point is that a rhizome or multiplicity never allows itself to be

overcoded, never has available a supplementary dimension over and

above its number of lines, that is, over and above the multiplicity of num-

bers attached to those lines. All multiplicities are flat, in the sense that they

fill or occupy all of their dimensions: we will therefore speak of a plane of
consistency of multiplicities, even though the dimensions of this "plane"

increase with the number of connections that are made on it. Multiplicities

are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or

deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect

with other multiplicities. The plane of consistency (grid) is the outside of

all multiplicities. The line of flight marks: the reality of a finite number of

dimensions that the multiplicity effectively fills; the impossibility of a sup-

plementary dimension, unless the multiplicity is transformed by the line of

flight; the possibility and necessity of flattening all of the multiplicities on

a single plane of consistency or exteriority, regardless of their number of

dimensions. The ideal for a book would be to lay everything out on a plane

of exteriority of this kind, on a single page, the same sheet: lived events, his-

torical determinations, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations.

Kleist invented a writing of this type, a broken chain of affects and variable

speeds, with accelerations and transformations, always in a relation with

the outside. Open rings. His texts, therefore, are opposed in every way to

the classical or romantic book constituted by the interiority of a substance

or subject. The war machine-book against the State apparatus-book. Flat
multiplicities of n dimensions are asignifying and asubjective. They are

designated by indefinite articles, or rather by partitives {some couchgrass,
some of a rhizome . ..).

4. Principle of asignifying rupture: against the oversignifying breaks

separating structures or cutting across a single structure. A rhizome may be

broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old

lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants because they form an

animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been

destroyed. Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to

which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc.,

as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees. There

is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line

of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. These lines always tie

back to one another. That is why one can never posit a dualism or a dichot-

omy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and the bad. You may make

a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is still a danger that you will

reencounter organizations that restratify everything, formations that

restore power to a signifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject—

anything you like, from Oedipal resurgences to fascist concretions. Groups

10 □ INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

and individuals contain microfascisms just waiting to crystallize. Yes,

couchgrass is also a rhizome. Good and bad are only the products of an

active and temporary selection, which must be renewed.

How could movements of deterritorialization and processes of

reterri-torialization not be relative, always connected, caught up in one

another? The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a

wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is

nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid's

reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting

its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome.

It could be said that the orchid imitates the wasp, reproducing its image in

a signifying fashion (mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.). But this is true only on

the level of the strata—a parallelism between two strata such that a plant

organization on one imitates an animal organization on the other. At the

same time, something else entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a

capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable

becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the

wasp. Each of these becomings brings about the deterritorialization of

one term and the reterritorialization of the other; the two becomings

interlink and form relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the

deterritorialization ever further. There is neither imitation nor

resemblance, only an exploding of two heterogeneous series on the line of

flight composed by a common rhizome that can no longer be attributed to

or subjugated by anything signifying. Rimy Chauvin expresses it well: "the
aparallel evolution of two beings that have absolutely nothing to do with

each other."

More generally, evolutionary schemas may be forced to

abandon the old model of the tree and descent. Under certain conditions,

a virus can connect to germ cells and transmit itself as the cellular gene

of a complex species; moreover, it can take flight, move into the cells of an

entirely different species, but not without bringing with it "genetic

information" from the first host (for example, Benveniste and Todaro's

current research on a type C virus, with its double connection to baboon

DNA and the DNA of certain kinds of domestic cats). Evolutionary

schemas would no longer follow models of arborescent descent going from

the least to the most differentiated, but instead a rhizome operating

immediately in the heterogeneous and jumping from one already

differentiated line to another.

Once again, there is aparallel evolution, of

the baboon and the cat; it is obvious that they are not models or copies of

each other (a becoming-baboon in the cat does not mean that the cat

"plays" baboon). We form a rhizome with our viruses, or rather our viruses

cause us to form a rhizome with other animals. As Francois Jacob says,

transfers of genetic material by viruses or through other procedures,

fusions of cells originating in different species, have results analogous to

NTRODUCTION: RHIZOME □ 11

those of "the abominable couplings dear to antiquity and the Middle

Ages."

Transversal communications between different lines scramble the

genealogical trees. Always look for the molecular, or even submolecular,

particle with which we are allied. We evolve and die more from our

polymorphous and rhizomatic flus than from hereditary diseases, or

diseases that have their own line of descent. The rhizome is an

anti-genealogy.

The same applies to the book and the world: contrary to a deeply rooted

belief, the book is not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome with the

world, there is an aparallel evolution of the book and the world; the book

assures the deterritorialization of the world, but the world effects a

reterri-torialization of the book, which in turn deterritorializes itself in the

world (if it is capable, if it can). Mimicry is a very bad concept, since it

relies on binary logic to describe phenomena of an entirely different

nature. The crocodile does not reproduce a tree trunk, any more than the

chameleon reproduces the colors of its surroundings. The Pink Panther

imitates nothing, it reproduces nothing, it paints the world its color, pink on

pink; this is its becoming-world, carried out in such a way that it becomes

imperceptible itself, asignifying, makes its rupture, its own line of flight,

follows its "aparallel evolution" through to the end. The wisdom of the

plants: even when they have roots, there is always an outside where they

form a rhizome with something else—with the wind, an animal, human

beings (and there is also an aspect under which animals themselves form

rhizomes, as do people, etc.). "Drunkenness as a triumphant irruption of

the plant in us." Always follow the rhizome by rupture; lengthen, prolong,

and relay the line of flight; make it vary, until you have produced the most

abstract and tortuous of lines of n dimensions and broken directions.

Conjugate deterritorialized flows. Follow the plants: you start by delimiting

a first line consisting of circles of convergence around successive

singularities; then you see whether inside that line new circles of

convergence establish themselves, with new points located outside the

limits and in other directions. Write, form a rhizome, increase your

territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where

it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency.

"Go first to your old plant and watch carefully the watercourse made by

the rain. By now the rain must have carried the seeds far away. Watch the

crevices made by the runoff, and from them determine the direction of the

flow. Then find the plant that is growing at the farthest point from your

plant. All the devil's weed plants that are growing in between are yours.

Later... you can extend the size of your territory by following the

watercourse from each point along the way."

Music has always sent out

lines of flight, like so many "transformational multiplicities," even

overturning the very codes that structure or

2 □ INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

arborify it; that is why musical form, right down to its ruptures and prolif-

erations, is comparable to a weed, a rhizome.

5 and 6. Principle of cartography and decalcomania: a rhizome is not

amenable to any structural or generative model. It is a stranger to any idea

of genetic axis or deep structure. A genetic axis is like an objective pivotal

unity upon which successive stages are organized; a deep structure is more

like a base sequence that can be broken down into immediate constituents,

while the unity of the product passes into another, transformational and

subjective, dimension. This does not constitute a departure from the repre-

sentative model of the tree, or root—pivotal taproot or fascicles (for exam-

ple, Chomsky's "tree" is associated with a base sequence and represents the

process of its own generation in terms of binary logic). A variation on the

oldest form of thought. It is our view that genetic axis and profound struc-

ture are above all infinitely reproducible principles of tracing. All of tree

logic is a logic of tracing and reproduction. In linguistics as in psychoanaly-

sis, its object is an unconscious that is itself representative, crystallized

into codified complexes, laid out along a genetic axis and distributed

within a syntagmatic structure. Its goal is to describe a de facto state, to

maintain balance in intersubjective relations, or to explore an unconscious

that is already there from the start, lurking in the dark recesses of memory

and language. It consists of tracing, on the basis of an overcoding structure

or supporting axis, something that comes ready-made. The tree articulates

and hierarchizes tracings; tracings are like the leaves of a tree.

The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing. Make a

map, not a tracing. The orchid does not reproduce the tracing of the wasp;

it forms a map with the wasp, in a rhizome. What distinguishes the map

from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in

contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed

in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between

fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum

opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency. It is itself a

part of the rhizome. The map is open and connectable in all of its dimen-

sions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It

can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an

individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived

of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation. Per-

haps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it

always has multiple entryways; in this sense, the burrow is an animal rhi-

zome, and sometimes maintains a clear distinction between the line of

flight as passageway and storage or living strata (cf. the muskrat). A map

has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes

back "to the same." The map has to do with performance, whereas the trac-

NTRODUCTION: RHIZOME □ 13

ing always involves an alleged "competence." Unlike psychoanalysis, psy-

choanalytic competence (which confines every desire and statement to a

genetic axis or overcoding structure, and makes infinite, monotonous trac-

ings of the stages on that axis or the constituents of that structure),

schizoanalysis rejects any idea of pretraced destiny, whatever name is

given to it—divine, anagogic, historical, economic, structural, hereditary,

or syntagmatic. (It is obvious that Melanie Klein has no understanding of

the cartography of one of her child patients, Little Richard, and is content

to make ready-made tracings—Oedipus, the good daddy and the bad

daddy, the bad mommy and the good mommy—while the child makes a

desperate attempt to carry out a performance that the psychoanalyst

totally misconstrues.)

Drives and part-objects are neither stages on a

genetic axis nor positions in a deep structure; they are political options for

problems, they are entryways and exits, impasses the child lives out politi-

cally, in other words, with all the force of his or her desire.

Have we not, however, reverted to a simple dualism by contrasting maps

to tracings, as good and bad sides? Is it not of the essence of the map to be

traceable? Is it not of the essence of the rhizome to intersect roots and

sometimes merge with them? Does not a map contain phenomena of

redundancy that are already like tracings of its own? Does not a multipli-

city have strata upon which unifications and totalizations, massifications,

mimetic mechanisms, signifying power takeovers, and subjective attribu-

tions take root? Do not even lines of flight, due to their eventual diver-

gence, reproduce the very formations their function it was to dismantle or

outflank? But the opposite is also true. It is a question of method: the trac-
ing should always be put back on the map. This operation and the previous

one are not at all symmetrical. For it is inaccurate to say that a tracing

reproduces the map. It is instead like a photograph or X ray that begins by

selecting or isolating, by artificial means such as colorations or other

restrictive procedures, what it intends to reproduce. The imitator always

creates the model, and attracts it. The tracing has already translated the

map into an image; it has already transformed the rhizome into roots and

radicles. It has organized, stabilized, neutralized the multiplicities accord-

ing to the axes of signifiance and subjectification belonging to it. It has gen-

erated, structurahzed the rhizome, and when it thinks it is reproducing

something else it is in fact only reproducing itself. That is why the tracing is

so dangerous. It injects redundancies and propagates them. What the trac-

ing reproduces of the map or rhizome are only the impasses, blockages,

incipient taproots, or points of structuration. Take a look at psychoanalysis

and linguistics: all the former has ever made are tracings or photos of the

unconscious, and the latter of language, with all the betrayals that implies

(it's not surprising that psychoanalysis tied its fate to that of linguistics).

4 □ INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

Look at what happened to Little Hans already, an example of child psycho-

analysis at its purest: they kept on BREAKING HIS RHIZOME and BLOTCHING

HIS MAP, setting it straight for him, blocking his every way out, until he

began to desire his own shame and guilt, until they had rooted shame and

guilt in him, PHOBIA (they barred him from the rhizome of the building,

then from the rhizome of the street, they rooted him in his parents' bed,

they radicled him to his own body, they fixated him on Professor Freud).

Freud explicitly takes Little Hans's cartography into account, but always

and only in order to project it back onto the family photo. And look what

Melanie Klein did to Little Richard's geopolitical maps: she developed

photos from them, made tracings of them. Strike the pose or follow the

axis, genetic stage or structural destiny—one way or the other, your rhi-

zome will be broken. You will be allowed to live and speak, but only after

every outlet has been obstructed. Once a rhizome has been obstructed,

arborified, it's all over, no desire stirs; for it is always by rhizome that desire

moves and produces. Whenever desire climbs a tree, internal repercus-

sions trip it up and it falls to its death; the rhizome, on the other hand, acts

on desire by external, productive outgrowths.

That is why it is so important to try the other, reverse but nonsym-

metrical, operation. Plug the tracings back into the map, connect the roots

or trees back up with a rhizome. In the case of Little Hans, studying the

unconscious would be to show how he tries to build a rhizome, with the

family house but also with the line of flight of the building, the street, etc.;

how these lines are blocked, how the child is made to take root in the family,

be photographed under the father, be traced onto the mother's bed; then

how Professor Freud's intervention assures a power takeover by the

signifier, a subjectification of affects; how the only escape route left to the

child is a becoming-animal perceived as shameful and guilty (the

becoming-horse of Little Hans, a truly political option). But these impasses

must always be resituated on the map, thereby opening them up to possible

lines of flight. The same applies to the group map: show at what point in the

rhizome there form phenomena of massification, bureaucracy, leadership,

fascization, etc., which lines nevertheless survive, if only underground,

continuing to make rhizome in the shadows. Deligny's method: map the

gestures and movements of an autistic child, combine several maps for the

same child, for several different children.

If it is true that it is of the

essence of the map or rhizome to have multiple entryways, then it is plausi-

ble that one could even enter them through tracings or the root-tree, assum-

ing the necessary precautions are taken (once again, one must avoid any

Manichaean dualism). For example, one will often be forced to take dead

ends, to work with signifying powers and subjective affections, to find a

foothold in formations that are Oedipal or paranoid or even worse,

NTRODUCTION: RHIZOME D 15

rigidified territorialities that open the way for other transformational

operations. It is even possible for psychoanalysis to serve as a foothold, in

spite of itself. In other cases, on the contrary, one will bolster oneself

directly on a line of flight enabling one to blow apart strata, cut roots, and

make new connections. Thus, there are very diverse map-tracing,

rhizome-root assemblages, with variable coefficients of

deterritorialization. There exist tree or root structures in rhizomes;

conversely, a tree branch or root division may begin to burgeon into a

rhizome. The coordinates are determined not by theoretical analyses

implying universals but by a pragmatics composing multiplicities or

aggregates of intensities. A new rhizome may form in the heart of a tree,

the hollow of a root, the crook of a branch. Or else it is a microscopic

element of the root-tree, a radicle, that gets rhizome production going.

Accounting and bureaucracy proceed by tracings: they can begin to

burgeon nonetheless, throwing out rhizome stems, as in a Kafka novel.

An intensive trait starts working for itself, a hallucinatory perception,

synesthesia, perverse mutation, or play of images shakes loose, challenging

the hegemony of the signifier. In the case of the child, gestural, mimetic,

ludic, and other semiotic systems regain their freedom and extricate

themselves from the "tracing," that is, from the dominant competence of

the teacher's language—a microscopic event upsets the local balance of

power. Similarly, generative trees constructed according to Chomsky's

syntagmatic model can open up in all directions, and in turn form a rhi-

zome.

To be rhizomorphous is to produce stems and filaments that seem

to be roots, or better yet connect with them by penetrating the trunk, but

put them to strange new uses. We're tired of trees. We should stop believing

in trees, roots, and radicles. They've made us suffer too much. All of

arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics. Noth-

ing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and

aerial roots, adventitious growths and rhizomes. Amsterdam, a city

entirely without roots, a rhizome-city with its stem-canals, where utility

connects with the greatest folly in relation to a commercial war machine.

Thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or ramified

matter. What are wrongly called "dendrites" do not assure the connection

of neurons in a continuous fabric. The discontinuity between cells, the role

of the axons, the functioning of the synapses, the existence of synaptic

microfissures, the leap each message makes across these fissures, make the

brain a multiplicity immersed in its plane of consistency or neuroglia, a

whole uncertain, probabilistic system ("the uncertain nervous system").

Many people have a tree growing in their heads, but the brain itself is much

more a grass than a tree. "The axon and the dendrite twist around each

other like bindweed around brambles, with synapses at each of the

thorns."

The same goes for memory. Neurologists and psychophysiolo-

16 D INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

gists distinguish between long-term memory and short-term memory (on

the order of a minute). The difference between them is not simply quantita-

tive: short-term memory is of the rhizome or diagram type, and long-term

memory is arborescent and centralized (imprint, engram, tracing, or pho-

tograph). Short-term memory is in no way subject to a law of contiguity or

immediacy to its object; it can act at a distance, come or return a long time

after, but always under conditions of discontinuity, rupture, and multipli-

city. Furthermore, the difference between the two kinds of memory is not

that of two temporal modes of apprehending the same thing; they do not

grasp the same thing, memory, or idea. The splendor of the short-term

Idea: one writes using short-term memory, and thus short-term ideas, even

if one reads or rereads using long-term memory of long-term concepts.

Short-term memory includes forgetting as a process; it merges not with the

instant but instead with the nervous, temporal, and collective rhizome.

Long-term memory (family, race, society, or civilization) traces and trans-

lates, but what it translates continues to act in it, from a distance, offbeat,

in an "untimely" way, not instantaneously.

The tree and root inspire a sad image of thought that is forever imitating

the multiple on the basis of a centered or segmented higher unity. If we con-

sider the set, branches-roots, the trunk plays the role of opposed segment

for one of the subsets running from bottom to top: this kind of segment is a

"link dipole," in contrast to the "unit dipoles" formed by spokes radiating

from a single center.

Even if the links themselves proliferate, as in the

radicle system, one can never get beyond the One-Two, and fake multiplici-

ties. Regenerations, reproductions, returns, hydras, and medusas do not

get us any further. Arborescent systems are hierarchical systems with cen-

ters of signifiance and subjectification, central automata like organized

memories. In the corresponding models, an element only receives infor-

mation from a higher unit, and only receives a subjective affection along

preestablished paths. This is evident in current problems in information

science and computer science, which still cling to the oldest modes of

thought in that they grant all power to a memory or central organ. Pierre

Rosenstiehl and Jean Petitot, in a fine article denouncing "the imagery of

command trees" (centered systems or hierarchical structures), note that

"accepting the primacy of hierarchical structures amounts to giving

arborescent structures privileged status.... The arborescent form admits of

topological explanation.... In a hierarchical system, an individual has only

one active neighbor, his or her hierarchical superior.... The channels of

transmission are preestablished: the arborescent system preexists the

individual, who is integrated into it at an allotted place" (signifiance and

subjectification). The authors point out that even when one thinks one has

reached a multiplicity, it may be a false one—of what we call the radicle

NTRODUCTION: RHIZOME □ 17

type—because its ostensibly nonhierarchical presentation or statement in

fact only admits of a totally hierarchical solution. An example is the

famous friendship theorem: "If any two given individuals in a society have

precisely one mutual friend, then there exists an individual who is the

friend of all the others." (Rosenstiehl and Petitot ask who that mutual

friend is. Who is "the universal friend in this society of couples: the master,

the confessor, the doctor? These ideas are curiously far removed from the

initial axioms." Who is this friend of humankind? Is it the .pMosopher as

he appears in classical thought, even if he is an aborted unity that makes

itself felt only through its absence or subjectivity, saying all the while, I

know nothing, I am nothing?) Thus the authors speak of dictatorship theo-

rems. Such is indeed the principle of roots-trees, or their outcome: the

radicle solution, the structure of Power.

To these centered systems, the authors contrast acentered systems,

finite networks of automata in which communication runs from any neigh-

bor to any other, the stems or channels do not preexist, and all individuals

are interchangeable, defined only by their state at a given moment—such

that the local operations are coordinated and the final, global result syn-

chronized without a central agency. Transduction of intensive states

replaces topology, and "the graph regulating the circulation of information

is in a way the opposite of the hierarchical graph.. . . There is no reason for

the graph to be a tree" (we have been calling this kind of graph a map). The

problem of the war machine, or the firing squad: is a general necessary for n

individuals to manage to fire in unison? The solution without a General is

to be found in an acentered multiplicity possessing a finite number of

states with signals to indicate corresponding speeds, from a war rhizome or

guerrilla logic point of view, without any tracing, without any copying of a

central order. The authors even demonstrate that this kind of machinic

multiplicity, assemblage, or society rejects any centralizing or unifying

automaton as an "asocial intrusion."

Under these conditions, n is in fact

always n - 1. Rosenstiehl and Petitot emphasize that the opposition,

centered-acentered, is valid less as a designation for things than as a mode

of calculation applied to things. Trees may correspond to the rhizome, or

they may burgeon into a rhizome. It is true that the same thing is generally

susceptible to both modes of calculation or both types of regulation, but

not without undergoing a change in state. Take psychoanalysis as an exam-

ple again: it subjects the unconscious to arborescent structures, hierarchi-

cal graphs, recapitulatory memories, central organs, the phallus, the

phallus-tree—not only in its theory but also in its practice of calculation

and treatment. Psychoanalysis cannot change its method in this regard: it

bases its own dictatorial power upon a dictatorial conception of the uncon-

scious. Psychoanalysis's margin of maneuverability is therefore very

18 □ INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

limited. In both psychoanalysis and its object, there is always a general,

always a leader (General Freud). Schizoanalysis, on the other hand, treats

the unconscious as an acentered system, in other words, as a machinic net-

work of finite automata (a rhizome), and thus arrives at an entirely differ-

ent state of the unconscious. These same remarks apply to linguistics;

Rosenstiehl and Petitot are right to bring up the possibility of an

"acentered organization of a society of words." For both statements and

desires, the issue is never to reduce the unconscious or to interpret it or to

make it signify according to a tree model. The issue is to produce the uncon-
scious, and with it new statements, different desires: the rhizome is pre-

cisely this production of the unconscious.

It is odd how the tree has dominated Western reality and all of Western

thought, from botany to biology and anatomy, but also gnosiology, theol-

ogy, ontology, all of philosophy . ..: the root-foundation, Grund, racine,
fondement. The West has a special relation to the forest, and deforestation;

the fields carved from the forest are populated with seed plants produced

by cultivation based on species lineages of the arborescent type; animal

raising, carried out on fallow fields, selects lineages forming an entire ani-

mal arborescence. The East presents a different figure: a relation to the

steppe and the garden (or in some cases, the desert and the oasis), rather

than forest and field; cultivation of tubers by fragmentation of the individ-

ual; a casting aside or bracketing of animal raising, which is confined to

closed spaces or pushed out onto the steppes of the nomads. The West: agri-

culture based on a chosen lineage containing a large number of variable

individuals. The East: horticulture based on a small number of individuals

derived from a wide range of "clones." Does not the East, Oceania in par-

ticular, offer something like a rhizomatic model opposed in every respect

to the Western model of the tree? Andre Haudricourt even sees this as the

basis for the opposition between the moralities or philosophies of tran-

scendence dear to the West and the immanent ones of the East: the God

who sows and reaps, as opposed to the God who replants and unearths

(replanting of offshoots versus sowing of seeds).

Transcendence: a specif-

ically European disease. Neither is music the same, the music of the earth is

different, as is sexuality: seed plants, even those with two sexes in the same

plant, subjugate sexuality to the reproductive model; the rhizome, on the

other hand, is a liberation of sexuality not only from reproduction but also

from genitality. Here in the West, the tree has implanted itself in our bod-

ies, rigidifying and stratifying even the sexes. We have lost the rhizome, or

the grass. Henry Miller: "China is the weed in the human cabbage patch.

... The weed is the Nemesis of human endeavor.... Of all the imaginary

existences we attribute to plant, beast and star the weed leads the most sat-

isfactory life of all. True, the weed produces no lilies, no battleships, no Ser-

NTRODUCTION: RHIZOME □ 19

mons on the Mount.... Eventually the weed gets the upper hand. Eventu-

ally things fall back into a state of China. This condition is usually referred

to by historians as the Dark Age. Grass is the only way out.... The weed

exists only to fill the waste spaces left by cultivated areas. It grows between,

among other things. The lily is beautiful, the cabbage is provender, the

poppy is maddening—but the weed is rank growth ...: it points a

moral."

Which China is Miller talking about? The old China, the new, an

imaginary one, or yet another located on a shifting map?

America is a special case. Of course it is not immune from domination

by trees or the search for roots. This is evident even in the literature, in the

quest for a national identity and even for a European ancestry or genealogy

(Kerouac going off in search of his ancestors). Nevertheless, everything

important that has happened or is happening takes the route of the Ameri-

can rhizome: the beatniks, the underground, bands and gangs, successive

lateral offshoots in immediate connection with an outside. American

books are different from European books, even when the American sets off

in pursuit of trees. The conception of the book is different. Leaves of Grass.

And directions in America are different: the search for arborescence and

the return to the Old World occur in the East. But there is the rhizomatic

West, with its Indians without ancestry, its ever-receding limit, its shifting

and displaced frontiers. There is a whole American "map" in the West,

where even the trees form rhizomes. America reversed the directions: it put

its Orient in the West, as if it were precisely in America that the earth came

full circle; its West is the edge of the East.

(India is not the intermediary

between the Occident and the Orient, as Haudricourt believed: America is

the pivot point and mechanism of reversal.) The American singer Patti

Smith sings the bible of the American dentist: Don't go for the root, follow

the canal...

Are there not also two kinds of bureaucracy, or even three (or still more)?

Western bureaucracy: its agrarian, cadastral origins; roots and fields; trees

and their role as frontiers; the great census of William the Conqueror; feu-

dalism; the policies of the kings of France; making property the basis of the

State; negotiating land through warfare, litigation, and marriages. The

kings of France chose the lily because it is a plant with deep roots that clings

to slopes. Is bureaucracy the same in the Orient? Of course it is all too easy

to depict an Orient of rhizomes and immanence; yet it is true that in the

Orient the State does not act following a schema of arborescence corre-

sponding to preestablished, arborified, and rooted classes; its bureaucracy

is one of channels, for example, the much-discussed case of hydraulic

power with "weak property," in which the State engenders channeled and

channelizing classes (cf. the aspects of Wittfogel's work that have not been

refuted).

The despot acts as a river, not as a fountainhead, which is still a

0 □ INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

point, a tree-point or root; he flows with the current rather than sitting

under a tree; Buddha's tree itself becomes a rhizome; Mao's river and

Louis's tree. Has not America acted as an intermediary here as well? For it

proceeds both by internal exterminations and liquidations (not only the

Indians but also the farmers, etc.), and by successive waves of immigration

from the outside. The flow of capital produces an immense channel, a

quantification of power with immediate "quanta," where each person

profits from the passage of the money flow in his or her own way (hence the

reality-myth of the poor man who strikes it rich and then falls into poverty

again): in America everything comes together, tree and channel, root and

rhizome. There is no universal capitalism, there is no capitalism in itself;

capitalism is at the crossroads of all kinds of formations, it is neocapitalism

by nature. It invents its eastern face and western face, and reshapes them

both—all for the worst.

At the same time, we are on the wrong track with all these geographical

distributions. An impasse. So much the better. If it is a question of showing

that rhizomes also have their own, even more rigid, despotism and hierar-

chy, then fine and good: for there is no dualism, no ontological dualism

between here and there, no axiological dualism between good and bad, no

blend or American synthesis. There are knots of arborescence in rhizomes,

and rhizomatic offshoots in roots. Moreover, there are despotic formations

of immanence and channelization specific to rhizomes, just as there are

anarchic deformations in the transcendent system of trees, aerial roots,

and subterranean stems. The important point is that the root-tree and

canal-rhizome are not two opposed models: the first operates as a tran-

scendent model and tracing, even if it engenders its own escapes; the sec-

ond operates as an immanent process that overturns the model and

outlines a map, even if it constitutes its own hierarchies, even if it gives rise

to a despotic channel. It is not a question of this or that place on earth, or of

a given moment in history, still less of this or that category of thought. It is a

question of a model that is perpetually in construction or collapsing, and of

a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up

again. No, this is not a new or different dualism. The problem of writing: in

order to designate something exactly, anexact expressions are utterly

unavoidable. Not at all because it is a necessary step, or because one can

only advance by approximations: anexactitude is in no way an approxima-

tion; on the contrary, it is the exact passage of that which is under way. We

invoke one dualism only in order to challenge another. We employ a dual-

ism of models only in order to arrive at a process that challenges all models.

Each time, mental correctives are necessary to undo the dualisms we had

no wish to construct but through which we pass. Arrive at the magic

formula we all seek—

PLURALISM

MONISM

—via all the dualisms that are

NTRODUCTION: RHIZOME □ 21

the enemy, an entirely necessary enemy, the furniture we are forever

rearranging.

Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a rhizome: unlike trees

or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its

traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into

play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. The rhizome

is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. It is not the One that

becomes Two or even directly three, four, five, etc. It is not a multiple

derived from the One, or to which One is added (n + 1). It is composed not

of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither

beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and

which it overspills. It constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions

having neither subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane of con-

sistency, and from which the One is always subtracted (n - 1). When a mul-

tiplicity of this kind changes dimension, it necessarily changes in nature as

well, undergoes a metamorphosis. Unlike a structure, which is defined by a

set of points and positions, with binary relations between the points and

biunivocal relationships between the positions, the rhizome is made only

of lines: lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimensions, and the

line of flight or deterritorialization as the maximum dimension after

which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature.

These lines, or lineaments, should not be confused with lineages of the

arborescent type, which are merely localizable linkages between points and

positions. Unlike the tree, the rhizome is not the object of reproduction:

neither external reproduction as image-tree nor internal reproduction as

tree-structure. The rhizome is an antigenealogy. It is a short-term memory,

or antimemory. The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest,

capture, offshoots. Unlike the graphic arts, drawing, or photography,

unlike tracings, the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, con-

structed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible,

modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of

flight. It is tracings that must be put on the map, not the opposite. In con-

trast to centered (even polycentric) systems with hierarchical modes of

communication and preestablished paths, the rhizome is an acentered,

nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an

organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation

of states. What is at question in the rhizome is a relation to sexuality—but

also to the animal, the vegetal, the world, politics, the book, things natural

and artificial—that is totally different from the arborescent relation: all

manner of "becomings."

A plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end. A rhi-

zome is made of plateaus. Gregory Bateson uses the word "plateau" to

2 □ INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

designate something very special: a continuous, self-vibrating region of

intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmina-

tion point or external end. Bateson cites Balinese culture as an example:

mother-child sexual games, and even quarrels among men, undergo this

bizarre intensive stabilization. "Some sort of continuing plateau of inten-

sity is substituted for [sexual] climax," war, or a culmination point. It is a

regrettable characteristic of the Western mind to relate expressions and

actions to exterior or transcendent ends, instead of evaluating them on a

plane of consistency on the basis of their intrinsic value.

For example, a

book composed of chapters has culmination and termination points. What

takes place in a book composed instead of plateaus that communicate with

one another across microfissures, as in a brain? We call a "plateau" any

multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground

stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome. We are writing this

book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus. We have given it a circular

form, but only for laughs. Each morning we would wake up, and each of us

would ask himself what plateau he was going to tackle, writing five lines

here, ten there. We had hallucinatory experiences, we watched lines leave

one plateau and proceed to another like columns of tiny ants. We made cir-

cles of convergence. Each plateau can be read starting anywhere and can be

related to any other plateau. To attain the multiple, one must have a

method that effectively constructs it; no typographical cleverness, no lexi-

cal agility, no blending or creation of words, no syntactical boldness, can

substitute for it. In fact, these are more often than not merely mimetic pro-

cedures used to disseminate or disperse a unity that is retained in a differ-

ent dimension for an image-book. Technonarcissism. Typographical,

lexical, or syntactic creations are necessary only when they no longer

belong to the form of expression of a hidden unity, becoming themselves

dimensions of the multiplicity under consideration; we only know of rare

successes in this.

We ourselves were unable to do it. We just used words

that in turn function for us as plateaus. RHIZOMATICS = SCHIZOANALYSIS =

STRATOA

NALYSIS

PRAGMATICS

MICROPOLITICS

These words are con-

cepts, but concepts are lines, which is to say, number systems attached to a

particular dimension of the multiplicities (strata, molecular chains, lines

of flight or rupture, circles of convergence, etc.). Nowhere do we claim for

our concepts the title of a science. We are no more familiar with

scientif-icity than we are with ideology; all we know are assemblages. And

the only assemblages are machinic assemblages of desire and collective

assemblages of enunciation. No signifiance, no subjectification: writing

to the «th power (all individuated enunciation remains trapped within the

dominant significations, all signifying desire is associated with dominated

subjects). An assemblage, in its multiplicity, necessarily acts on semiotic

flows,

NTRODUCTION: RHIZOME □ 23

material flows, and social flows simultaneously (independently of any

recapitulation that may be made of it in a scientific or theoretical corpus).

There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world)

and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the

author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain

multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a book has no sequel

nor the world as its object nor one or several authors as its subject. In short,

we think that one cannot write sufficiently in the name of an outside. The

outside has no image, no signification, no subjectivity. The book as assem-

blage with the outside, against the book as image of the world. A

rhizome-book, not a dichotomous, pivotal, or fascicular book. Never send

down roots, or plant them, however difficult it may be to avoid reverting

to the old procedures. "Those things which occur to me, occur to me not

from the root up but rather only from somewhere about their middle. Let

someone then attempt to seize them, let someone attempt to seize a blade

of grass and hold fast to it when it begins to grow only from the middle."

Why is this so difficult? The question is directly one of perceptual

semiotics. It's not easy to see things in the middle, rather than looking down

on them from above or up at them from below, or from left to right or right

to left: try it, you'll see that everything changes. It's not easy to see the grass

in things and in words (similarly, Nietzsche said that an aphorism had to

be "ruminated"; never is a plateau separable from the cows that populate

it, which are also the clouds in the sky).

History is always written from the sedentary point of view and in the

name of a unitary State apparatus, at least a possible one, even when the

topic is nomads. What is lacking is a Nomadology, the opposite of a history.

There are rare successes in this also, for example, on the subject of the

Children's Crusades: Marcel Schwob's book multiplies narratives like so

many plateaus with variable numbers of dimensions. Then there is

Andrzejewski's book, Les portes du paradis (The gates of paradise), com-

posed of a single uninterrupted sentence; a flow of children; a flow of walk-

ing with pauses, straggling, and forward rushes; the semiotic flow of the

confessions of all the children who go up to the old monk at the head of the

procession to make their declarations; a flow of desire and sexuality, each

child having left out of love and more or less directly led by the dark posthu-

mous pederastic desire of the count of Vendome; all this with circles of con-

vergence. What is important is not whether the flows are "One or

multiple"—we're past that point: there is a collective assemblage of enun-

ciation, a machinic assemblage of desire, one inside the other and both

plugged into an immense outside that is a multiplicity in any case. A more

recent example is Armand Farrachi's book on the Fourth Crusade, La dis-
location, in which the sentences space themselves out and disperse, or else

4 □ INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

jostle together and coexist, and in which the letters, the typography begin

to dance as the crusade grows more delirious.

These are models of

nomadic and rhizomatic writing. Writing weds a war machine and lines of

flight, abandoning the strata, segmentarities, sedentarity, the State

apparatus. But why is a model still necessary? Aren't these books still

"images" of the Crusades? Don't they still retain a unity, in Schwob's case a

pivotal unity, in Farrachi's an aborted unity, and in the most beautiful

example, Les portes du paradis, the unity of the funereal count? Is there a

need for a more profound nomadism than that of the Crusades, a

nomadism of true nomads, or of those who no longer even move or imitate

anything? The nomadism of those who only assemble (agencent). How can

the book find an adequate outside with which to assemble in heterogeneity,

rather than a world to reproduce? The cultural book is necessarily a tracing:

already a tracing of itself, a tracing of the previous book by the same author,

a tracing of other books however different they may be, an endless tracing

of established concepts and words, a tracing of the world present, past, and

future. Even the anticultural book may still be burdened by too heavy a cul-

tural load: but it will use it actively, for forgetting instead of remembering,

for underdevelopment instead of progress toward development, in

nomadism rather than sedentarity, to make a map instead of a tracing.

RHIZOMATICS = POP ANALYSIS, even if the people have other things to do

besides read it, even if the blocks of academic culture or

pseudoscien-tificity in it are still too painful or ponderous. For science

would go completely mad if left to its own devices. Look at mathematics:

it's not a science, it's a monster slang, it's nomadic. Even in the realm of

theory, especially in the realm of theory, any precarious and pragmatic

framework is better than tracing concepts, with their breaks and progress

changing nothing. Imperceptible rupture, not signifying break. The

nomads invented a war machine in opposition to the State apparatus.

History has never comprehended nomadism, the book has never

comprehended the outside. The State as the model for the book and for

thought has a long history: logos, the philosopher-king, the transcendence

of the Idea, the interiority of the concept, the republic of minds, the court

of reason, the functionaries of thought, man as legislator and subject. The

State's pretension to be a world order, and to root man. The war machine's

relation to an outside is not another "model"; it is an assemblage that

makes thought itself nomadic, and the book a working part in every

mobile machine, a stem for a rhizome (Kleist and Kafka against Goethe).

Write to the nth power, the n - 1 power, write with slogans: Make rhi-

zomes, not roots, never plant! Don't sow, grow offshoots! Don't be one or

multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never plot a point! Speed turns the

point into a line!

Be quick, even when standing still! Line of chance, line

INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME □ 25

of hips, line of flight. Don't bring out the General in you! Don't have just

ideas, just have an idea (Godard). Have short-term ideas. Make maps, not

photos or drawings. Be the Pink Panther and your loves will be like the

wasp and the orchid, the cat and the baboon. As they say about old man

river:

He don't plant 'tatos

Don't plant cotton

Them that plants them is soon forgotten

But old man river he just keeps rollin' along

A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between

things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alli-

ance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb "to be," but the fabric of

the rhizome is the conjunction, "and. . . and.. . and. . ." This conjunction

carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb "to be." Where are you

going? Where are you coming from? What are you heading for? These are

totally useless questions. Making a clean slate, starting or beginning again

from ground zero, seeking a beginning or a foundation—all imply a false

conception of voyage and movement (a conception that is methodical, ped-

agogical, initiatory, symbolic...). But Kleist, Lenz, and Biichner have

another way of traveling and moving: proceeding from the middle, through

the middle, coming and going rather than starting and finishing.

Ameri-

can literature, and already English literature, manifest this rhizomatic

direction to an even greater extent; they know how to move between things,

establish a logic of the

AND

overthrow ontology, do away with foundations,

nullify endings and beginnings. They know how to practice pragmatics.

The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things

pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localizable relation

going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular

direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a

stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up

speed in the middle.

914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES? □ 27

in the instantaneous apprehension of a generic multiplicity: wolves. He

knew that this new and true proper name would be disfigured and mis-

spelled, retranscribed as a patronymic.

Freud, for his part, would go on to write some extraordinary pages.

Entirely practical pages: his article of 1915 on "The Unconscious," which

deals with the difference between neurosis and psychosis. Freud says that

hysterics or obsessives are people capable of making a global comparison

between a sock and a vagina, a scar and castration, etc. Doubtless, it is at

one and the same time that they apprehend the object globally and perceive

it as lost. Yet it would never occur to a neurotic to grasp the skin erotically

as a multiplicity of pores, little spots, little scars or black holes, or to grasp

the sock erotically as a multiplicity of stitches. The psychotic can: "we

should expect the multiplicity of these little cavities to prevent him from

using them as substitutes for the female genital."

Comparing a sock to a

vagina is OK, it's done all the time, but you'd have to be insane to compare

a pure aggregate of stitches to a field of vaginas: that's what Freud says.

This represents an important clinical discovery: a whole difference in style

between neurosis and psychosis. For example, Salvador Dali, in attempt-

ing to reproduce his delusions, may go on at length about THE rhinoceros

horn; he has not for all of that left neurotic discourse behind. But when he

starts comparing goosebumps to a field of tiny rhinoceros horns, we get the

feeling that the atmosphere has changed and that we are now in the pres-

ence of madness. Is it still a question of a comparison at all? It is, rather, a

pure multiplicity that changes elements, or becomes. On the micrological

level, the little bumps "become" horns, and the horns, little penises.

No sooner does Freud discover the greatest art of the unconscious, this

art of molecular multiplicities, than we find him tirelessly at work bringing

back molar unities, reverting to his familiar themes of the father, the penis,
the vagina, Castration with a capital C... (On the verge of discovering a

rhizome, Freud always returns to mere roots.) The reductive procedure of

the 1915 article is quite interesting: he says that the comparisons and iden-

tifications of the neurotic are guided by representations of things, whereas

all the psychotic has left are representations of words (for example, the

word "hole"). "What has dictated the substitution is not the resemblance

between the things denoted but the sameness of the words used to express

them" (p. 201). Thus, when there is no unity in the thing, there is at least

unity and identity in the word. It will be noted that names are taken in their
extensive usage, in other words, function as common nouns ensuring the

unification of an aggregate they subsume. The proper name can be nothing

more than an extreme case of the common noun, containing its already

domesticated multiplicity within itself and linking it to a being or object

posited as unique. This jeopardizes, on the side of words and things both,

8 □ 1914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES?

the relation of the proper name as an intensity to the multiplicity it instan-
taneously apprehends. For Freud, when the thing splinters and loses its
identity, the word is still there to restore that identity or invent a new one.
Freud counted on the word to reestablish a unity no longer found in things.
Are we not witnessing the first stirrings of a subsequent adventure, that of
the Signifier, the devious despotic agency that substitutes itself for
asignifying proper names and replaces multiplicities with the dismal unity
of an object declared lost?

We're not far from wolves. For the Wolf-Man, in his second so-called

psychotic episode, kept constant watch over the variations or changing
path of the little holes or scars on the skin of his nose. During the first epi-
sode, which Freud declares neurotic, he recounted a dream he had about
six or seven wolves in a tree, and drew five. Who is ignorant of the fact that
wolves travel in packs? Only Freud. Every child knows it. Not Freud. With
false scruples he asks, How are we to explain the fact that there are five, six,
or seven wolves in this dream? He has decided that this is neurosis, so he
uses the other reductive procedure: free association on the level of the rep-
resentation of things, rather than verbal subsumption on the level of the
representation of words. The result is the same, since it is always a question
of bringing back the unity or identity of the person or allegedly lost object.
The wolves will have to be purged of their multiplicity. This operation is
accomplished by associating the dream with the tale, "The Wolf and the
Seven Kid-Goats" (only six of which get eaten). We witness Freud's reduc-
tive glee; we literally see multiplicity leave the wolves to take the shape of
goats that have absolutely nothing to do with the story. Seven wolves that
are only kid-goats. Six wolves: the seventh goat (the Wolf-Man himself) is
hiding in the clock. Five wolves: he may have seen his parents make love at
five o'clock, and the roman numeral V is associated with the erotic spread-
ing of a woman's legs. Three wolves: the parents may have made love three
times. Two wolves: the first coupling the child may have seen was the two
parents more ferarum, or perhaps even two dogs. One wolf: the wolf is the
father, as we all knew from the start. Zero wolves: he lost his tail, he is not
just a castrater but also castrated. Who is Freud trying to fool? The wolves
never had a chance to get away and save their pack: it was already decided
from the very beginning that animals could serve only to represent coitus
between parents, or, conversely, be represented by coitus between parents.
Freud obviously knows nothing about the fascination exerted by wolves
and the meaning of their silent call, the call to become-wolf. Wolves watch,
intently watch, the dreaming child; it is so much more reassuring to tell
oneself that the dream produced a reversal and that it is really the child who
sees dogs or parents in the act of making love. Freud only knows the

914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES? D 29

Oedipalized wolf or dog, the castrated-castrating daddy-wolf, the dog in

the kennel, the analyst's bow-wow.

Franny is listening to a program on wolves. I say to her, Would you like to

be a wolf? She answers haughtily, How stupid, you can't be one wolf, you're

always eight or nine, six or seven. Not six or seven wolves all by yourself all

at once, but one wolf among others, with five or six others. In

becoming-wolf, the important thing is the position of the mass, and above

all the position of the subject itself in relation to the pack or

wolf-multiplicity: how the subject joins or does not join the pack, how far

away it stays, how it does or does not hold to the multiplicity. To soften

the harshness of her response, Franny recounts a dream: "There is a

desert. Again, it wouldn't make any sense to say that I am in the desert. It's

a panoramic vision of the desert, and it's not a tragic or uninhabited desert.

It's only a desert because of its ocher color and its blazing, shadowless

sun. There is a teeming crowd in it, a swarm of bees, a rumble of soccer

players, oragroup of Tuareg. lam on the edge of the crowd, at the periphery;
but I belong to it, I am attached to it by one of my extremities, a hand or
foot. I know that the periphery is the only place I can be, that I would die if

I let myself be drawn into the center of the fray, but just as certainly if I let

go of the crowd. This is not an easy position to stay in, it is even very

difficult to hold, for these beings are in constant motion and their

movements are unpredictable and follow no rhythm. They swirl, go

north, then suddenly east; none of the individuals in the crowd remains

in the same place in relation to the others. So I too am in perpetual

motion; all this demands a high level of tension, but it gives me a feeling of

violent, almost vertiginous, happiness." A very good schizo dream. To be

fully a part of the crowd and at the same time completely outside it, removed

from it: to be on the edge, to take a walk like Virginia Woolf (never again

will I say, "I am this, I am thai").

Problems of peopling in the unconscious: all that passes through the

pores of the schizo, the veins of the drug addict, swarming, teeming, fer-

ment, intensities, races and tribes. This tale of white skin prickling with

bumps and pustules, and of dwarfish black heads emerging from pores gri-

macing and abominable, needing to be shaved off every morning—is it a

tale by Jean Ray, who knew how to bring terror to phenomena of

micromultiplicity? And how about the "Lilliputian hallucinations" on

ether? One schizo, two schizos, three: "There are babies growing in my

every pore"—"With me, it's not in the pores, it's in my veins, little iron

rods growing in my veins"—"I don't want them to give me any shots,

except with camphorated alcohol. Otherwise breasts grow in my every

pore." Freud tried to approach crowd phenomena from the point of view of

the unconscious, but he did not see clearly, he did not see that the uncon-

scious itself was fundamentally a crowd. He was myopic and hard of

0 D 1914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES?

hearing; he mistook crowds for a single person. Schizos, on the other hand,

have sharp eyes and ears. They don't mistake the buzz and shove of the

crowd for daddy's voice. Once Jung had a dream about bones and skulls. A

bone or a skull is never alone. Bones are a multiplicity. But Freud wants the

dream to signify the death of someone. "Jung was surprised and pointed

out that there were several skulls, not just one. Yet Freud still. . ."

A multiplicity of pores, or blackheads, of little scars or stitches. Breasts,

babies, and rods. A multiplicity of bees, soccer players, or Tuareg. A multi-

plicity of wolves or jackals ... All of these things are irreducible but bring

us to a certain status of the formations of the unconscious. Let us try to

define the factors involved: first, something plays the role of the full

body—the body without organs. In the preceding dream it was the desert.

In the Wolf-Man's dream it is the denuded tree upon which the wolves are

perched. It is also the skin as envelope or ring, and the sock as reversible

surface. It can be a house or part of a house, any number of things, any-

thing. Whenever someone makes love, really makes love, that person con-

stitutes a body without organs, alone and with the other person or people.

A body without organs is not an empty body stripped of organs, but a body

upon which that which serves as organs (wolves, wolf eyes, wolf jaws?) is

distributed according to crowd phenomena, in Brownian motion, in the

form of molecular multiplicities. The desert is populous. Thus the body

without organs is opposed less to organs as such than to the organization of

the organs insofar as it composes an organism. The body without organs is

not a dead body but a living body all the more alive and teeming once it has

blown apart the organism and its organization. Lice hopping on the beach.

Skin colonies. The full body without organs is a body populated by multi-

plicities. The problem of the unconscious has most certainly nothing to do

with generation but rather peopling, population. It is an affair of world-

wide population on the full body of the earth, not organic familial genera-

tion. "I love to invent peoples, tribes, racial origins ... I return from my

tribes. As of today, I am the adoptive son of fifteen tribes, no more, no less.

And they in turn are my adopted tribes, for I love each of them more than if

I had been born into it." People say, After all, schizophrenics have a mother

and a father, don't they? Sorry, no, none as such. They only have a desert

with tribes inhabiting it, a full body clinging with multiplicities.

This brings us to the second factor, the nature of these multiplicities and

their elements. RHIZOME. One of the essential characteristics of the dream

of multiplicity is that each element ceaselessly varies and alters its distance

in relation to the others. On the Wolf-Man's nose, the elements, deter-

mined as pores in the skin, little scars in the pores, little ruts in the scar tis-

sue, ceaselessly dance, grow, and diminish. These variable distances are

not extensive quantities divisible by each other; rather, each is indivisible,

914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES? □ 31

or "relatively indivisible," in other words, they are not divisible below or

above a certain threshold, they cannot increase or diminish without their
elements changing in nature. A swarm of bees: here they come as a rumble

of soccer players in striped jerseys, or a band of Tuareg. Or: the wolf clan

doubles up with a swarm of bees against the gang of Deulhs, under the

direction of Mowgli, who runs on the edge (yes, Kipling understood the call

of the wolves, their libidinal meaning, better than Freud; and in the

Wolf-Man's case the story about wolves is followed by one about wasps

and butterflies, we go from wolves to wasps). What is the significance of

these indivisible distances that are ceaselessly transformed, and cannot be

divided or transformed without their elements changing in nature each

time? Is it not the intensive character of this kind of multiplicity's elements

and the relations between them? Exactly like a speed or a temperature,

which is not composed of other speeds and temperatures but rather is

enveloped in or envelops others, each of which marks a change in nature.

The metrical principle of these multiplicities is not to be found in a homo-

geneous milieu but resides elsewhere, in forces at work within them, in

physical phenomena inhabiting them, precisely in the libido, which consti-

tutes them from within, and in constituting them necessarily divides into

distinct qualitative and variable flows. Freud himself recognizes the multi-

plicity of libidinal "currents" that coexist in the Wolf-Man. That makes it

all the more surprising that he treats the multiplicities of the unconscious

the way he does. For him, there will always be a reduction to the One: the little

scars, the little holes, become subdivisions of the great scar or supreme

hole named castration; the wolves become substitutes for a single Father

who turns up everywhere, or wherever they put him. (As Ruth Mack

Brunswick says, Let's go all the way, the wolves are "all the fathers and doc-

tors" in the world; but the Wolf-Man thinks, "You trying to tell me my ass

isn't a wolf?")

What should have been done is the opposite, all of this should be under-

stood in intensity: the Wolf is the pack, in other words, the multiplicity

instantaneously apprehended as such insofar as it approaches or moves

away from zero, each distance being nondecomposable. Zero is the body

without organs of the Wolf-Man. If the unconscious knows nothing of

negation, it is because there is nothing negative in the unconscious, only

indefinite moves toward and away from zero, which does not at all express

lack but rather the positivity of the full body as support and prop ("for an

afflux is necessary simply to signify the absence of intensity"). The wolves

designate an intensity, a band of intensity, a threshold of intensity on the

Wolf-Man's body without organs. A dentist told the Wolf-Man that he

"would soon lose all his teeth because of the violence of his bite"—and that

his gums were pocked with pustules and little holes.

Jaw as high intensity,

2 □ 1914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES?

teeth as low intensity, and pustular gums as approach to zero. The wolf, as

the instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity in a given region, is not a

representative, a substitute, but an I feel. I feel myself becoming a wolf, one

wolf among others, on the edge of the pack. A cry of anguish, the only one

Freud hears: Help me not become wolf (or the opposite, Help me not fail in

this becoming). It is not a question of representation: don't think for a min-

ute that it has to do with believing oneself a wolf, representing oneself as a

wolf. The wolf, wolves, are intensities, speeds, temperatures,

nondecom-posable variable distances. A swarming, a wolfing. Who could

ever believe that the anal machine bears no relation to the wolf machine, or

that the two are only linked by an Oedipal apparatus, by the all-too-human

figure of the Father? For in the end the anus also expresses an intensity, in

this case the approach to zero of a distance that cannot be decomposed

without its elements changing in nature. Afield of anuses, just like a pack of
wolves. Does not the child, on the periphery, hold onto the wolves by his

anus? The jaw descends to the anus. Hold onto those wolves by your jaw

and your anus. The jaw is not a wolf jaw, it's not that simple; jaw and wolf

form a multiplicity that is transformed into eye and wolf, anus and wolf,

as a function of other distances, at other speeds, with other multiplicities,

between thresholds. Lines of flight or of deterritorialization,

becoming-wolf, becoming-inhuman, deterritorialized intensities: that is

what multiplicity is. To become wolf or to become hole is to

deterritorialize oneself following distinct but entangled lines. A hole is no

more negative than a wolf. Castration, lack, substitution: a tale told by an

overconscious idiot who has no understanding of multiplicities as

formations of the unconscious. A wolf is a hole, they are both particles of

the unconscious, nothing but particles, productions of particles, particulate

paths, as elements of molecular multiplicities. It is not even sufficient to

say that intense and moving particles pass through holes; a hole is just as

much a particle as what passes through it. Physicists say that holes are not

the absence of particles but particles traveling faster than the speed of

light. Flying anuses, speeding vaginas, there is no castration.

Let us return to the story of multiplicity, for the creation of this substan-

tive marks a very important moment. It was created precisely in order to

escape the abstract opposition between the multiple and the one, to escape

dialectics, to succeed in conceiving the multiple in the pure state, to cease

treating it as a numerical fragment of a lost Unity or Totality or as the

organic element of a Unity or Totality yet to come, and instead distinguish

between different types of multiplicity. Thus we find in the work of the

mathematician and physicist Riemann a distinction between discreet mul-

tiplicities and continuous multiplicities (the metrical principle of the sec-

ond kind of multiplicity resides solely in forces at work within them). Then

914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES? D 33

in Meinong and Russell we find a distinction between multiplicities of

magnitude or divisibility, which are extensive, and multiplicities of dis-

tance, which are closer to the intensive. And in Bergson there is a distinc-

tion between numerical or extended multiplicities and qualitative or

durational multiplicities. We are doing approximately the same thing

when we distinguish between arborescent multiplicities and rhizomatic

multiplicities. Between macro- and micromultiplicities. On the one hand,

multiplicities that are extensive, divisible, and molar; unifiable,

total-izable, organizable; conscious or preconscious—and on the other

hand, libidinal, unconscious, molecular, intensive multiplicities

composed of particles that do not divide without changing in nature, and

distances that do not vary without entering another multiplicity and that

constantly construct and dismantle themselves in the course of their

communications, as they cross over into each other at, beyond, or before

a certain threshold. The elements of this second kind of multiplicity are

particles; their relations are distances; their movements are Brownian;

their quantities are intensities, differences in intensity.

This only provides the logical foundation. Elias Canetti distinguishes

between two types of multiplicity that are sometimes opposed but at other

times interpenetrate: mass ("crowd") multiplicities and pack multiplici-

ties. Among the characteristics of a mass, in Canetti's sense, we should note

large quantity, divisibility and equality of the members, concentration,

sociability of the aggregate as a whole, one-way hierarchy, organization of

territoriality or territorialization, and emission of signs. Among the char-

acteristics of a pack are small or restricted numbers, dispersion,

nonde-composable variable distances, qualitative metamorphoses,

inequalities as remainders or crossings, impossibility of a fixed

totalization or hierar-chization, a Brownian variability in directions, lines

of deterritorial-ization, and projection of particles.

Doubtless, there is no

more equality or any less hierarchy in packs than in masses, but they are

of a different kind. The leader of the pack or the band plays move by

move, must wager everything every hand, whereas the group or mass

leader consolidates or capitalizes on past gains. The pack, even on its own

turf, is constituted by a line of flight or of deterritorialization that is a

component part of it, and to which it accredits a high positive value,

whereas masses only integrate these lines in order to segment them,

obstruct them, ascribe them a negative sign. Canetti notes that in a pack

each member is alone even in the company of others (for example,

wolves on the hunt); each takes care of himself at the same time as

participating in the band. "In the changing constellation of the pack, in its

dances and expeditions, he will again and again find himself at its edge.

He may be in the center, and then, immediately afterwards, at the edge

again; at the edge and then back in the center. When

4 □ 1914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES?

the pack forms a ring around the fire, each man will have neighbors to the

right and left, but no one behind him; his back is naked and exposed to the

wilderness."

We recognize this as the schizo position, being on the periph-

ery, holding on by a hand or a foot. . . As opposed to the paranoid position

of the mass subject, with all the identifications of the individual with the

group, the group with the leader, and the leader with the group; be securely

embedded in the mass, get close to the center, never be at the edge except in

the line of duty. Why assume (as does Konrad Lorenz, for example) that

bands and their type of companionship represent a more rudimentary evo-

lutionary state than group societies or societies of conjugality? Not only do

there exist bands of humans, but there are particularly refined examples:

"high-society life" differs from "sociality" in that it is closer to the pack.

Social persons have a certain envious and erroneous image of the

high-society person because they are ignorant of high-society positions and

hierarchies, the relations of force, the very particular ambitions and

projects. High-society relations are never coextensive with social

relations, they do not coincide. Even "mannerisms" (all bands have them)

are specific to micromultiplicities and distinct from social manners or

customs.

There is no question, however, of establishing a dualist opposition

between the two types of multiplicities, molecular machines and molar

machines', that would be no better than the dualism between the One and

the multiple. There are only multiplicities of multiplicities forming a single
assemblage, operating in the same assemblage: packs in masses and masses

in packs. Trees have rhizome lines, and the rhizome points of

arbor-escence. How could mad particles be produced with anything but a

gigantic cyclotron? How could lines of deterritorialization be assignable

outside of circuits of territoriality? Where else but in wide expanses, and

in major upheavals in those expanses, could a tiny rivulet of new intensity

suddenly start to flow? What do you not have to do in order to produce a

new sound? Becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, becoming-inhuman,

each involves a molar extension, a human hyperconcentration, or

prepares the way for them. In Kafka, it is impossible to separate the

erection of a great paranoid bureaucratic machine from the installation of

little schizo machines of becoming-dog or becoming-beetle. In the case

of the Wolf-Man, it is impossible to separate the becoming-wolf of his

dream from the military and religious organization of his obsessions. A

military man does a wolf; a military man does a dog. There are not two

multiplicities or two machines; one and the same machinic assemblage

produces and distributes the whole, in other words, the set of statements

corresponding to the "complex." What does psychoanalysis have to say

about all of this? Oedipus, nothing but Oedipus, because it hears nothing

and listens to nobody. It flattens everything, masses and packs, molecular

and molar machines,

914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES? □ 35

multiplicities of every variety. Take the Wolf-Man's second dream during

his so-called psychotic episode: in the street, a wall with a closed door, to

the left an empty dresser; in front of the dresser, the patient, and a big

woman with a little scar who seems to want to skirt around the wall; behind

the wall, wolves, rushing for the door. Even Brunswick can't go wrong:

although she recognizes herself in the big woman, she does see that this

time the wolves are Bolsheviks, the revolutionary mass that had emptied

the dresser and confiscated the Wolf-Man's fortune. The wolves, in a
metastable state, have gone over to a large-scale social machine But psycho-

analysis has nothing to say about all of these points—except what Freud

already said: it all leads back to daddy (what do you know, he was one of the

leaders of the liberal party in Russia, but that's hardly important; all that

needs to be said is that the revolution "assuaged the patient's feelings of

guilt"). You'd think that the investments and counterinvestments of the

libido had nothing to do with mass disturbances, pack movements, collec-

tive signs, and particles of desire.

Thus it does not suffice to attribute molar multiplicities and mass

machines to the preconscious, reserving another kind of machine or multi-

plicity for the unconscious. For it is the assemblage of both of these that is

the province of the unconscious, the way in which the former condition the

latter, and the latter prepare the way for the former, or elude them or return

to them: the libido suffuses everything. Keep everything in sight at the

same time—that a social machine or an organized mass has a molecular

unconscious that marks not only its tendency to decompose but also the

current components of its very operation and organization; that any indi-

vidual caught up in a mass has his/her own pack unconscious, which does

not necessarily resemble the packs of the mass to which that individual

belongs; that an individual or mass will live out in its unconscious the

masses and packs of another mass or another individual. What does it

mean to love somebody? It is always to seize that person in a mass, extract

him or her from a group, however small, in which he or she participates,

whether it be through the family only or through something else; then to

find that person's own packs, the multiplicities he or she encloses within

himself or herself which may be of an entirely different nature. To join

them to mine, to make them penetrate mine, and for me to penetrate the

other person's. Heavenly nuptials, multiplicities of multiplicities. Every

love is an exercise in depersonalization on a body without organs yet to be

formed, and it is at the highest point of this depersonalization that some-

one can be named, receives his or her family name or first name, acquires

the most intense discernibility in the instantaneous apprehension of the

multiplicities belonging to him or her, and to which he or she belongs. A

pack of freckles on a face, a pack of boys speaking through the voice of a

6 □ 1914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES?

woman, a clutch of girls in Charlus's voice, a horde of wolves in somebody's

throat, a multiplicity of anuses in the anus, mouth, or eye one is intent

upon. We each go through so many bodies in each other. Albertine is slowly

extracted from a group of girls with its own number, organization, code,

and hierarchy; and not only is this group or restricted mass suffused by an

unconscious, but Albertine has her own multiplicities that the narrator,

once he has isolated her, discovers on her body and in her lies—until the

end of their love returns her to the indiscernible.

Above all, it should not be thought that it suffices to distinguish the

masses and exterior groups someone belongs to or participates in from the

internal aggregates that person envelops in himself or herself. The

distinction to be made is not at all between exterior and interior, which

are always relative, changing, and reversible, but between different types

of multiplicities that coexist, interpenetrate, and change places—

machines, cogs, motors, and elements that are set in motion at a given

moment, forming an assemblage productive of statements: "I love you" (or

whatever). For Kafka, Felice is inseparable from a certain social machine,

and, as a representative of the firm that manufactures them, from

parlograph machines; how could she not belong to that organization in the

eyes of Kafka, a man fascinated by commerce and bureaucracy? But at the

same time, Felice's teeth, her big carnivorous teeth, send her racing down

other lines, into the molecular multiplicities of a becoming-dog, a

becoming-jackal . .. Felice is inseparable from the sign of the modern

social machines belonging to her, from those belonging to Kafka (not the

same ones), and from the particles, the little molecular machines, the

whole strange becoming or journey Kafka will make and have her make

through his perverse writing apparatus.

There are no individual statements, only statement-producing

ma-chinic assemblages. We say that the assemblage is fundamentally

libidinal and unconscious. It is the unconscious in person. For the moment,

we will note that assemblages have elements (or multiplicities) of several

kinds: human, social, and technical machines, organized molar machines;

molecular machines with their particles of becoming-inhuman; Oedipal

apparatuses (yes, of course there are Oedipal statements, many of them);

and counter-Oedipal apparatuses, variable in aspect and functioning. We

will go into it later. We can no longer even speak of distinct machines,

only of types of interpenetrating multiplicities that at any given moment

form a single machinic assemblage, the faceless figure of the libido. Each

of us is caught up in an assemblage of this kind, and we reproduce its

statements when we think we are speaking in our own name; or rather we

speak in our own name when we produce its statement. And what bizarre

statements they are; truly, the talk of lunatics. We mentioned Kafka, but

we could just

914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES? □ 37

as well have said the Wolf-Man: a religious-military machine that Freud

attributes to obsessional neurosis; an anal pack machine, an anal be-

coming-wolf or -wasp or -butterfly machine, which Freud attributes to the

hysteric character; an Oedipal apparatus, which Freud considers the sole

motor, the immobile motor that must be found everywhere; and a

counter-Oedipal apparatus—incest with the sister, schizo-incest, or love

with "people of inferior station"; and anality, homosexuality?—all that

Freud sees only as Oedipal substitutes, regressions, and derivatives. In

truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing. He has no idea what a

libidinal assemblage is, with all the machineries it brings into play, all the

multiple loves.

Of course, there are Oedipal statements. For example, Kafka's story,

"Jackals and Arabs," is easy to read in that way: you can always do it, you

can't lose, it works every time, even if you understand nothing. The Arabs

are clearly associated with the father and the jackals with the mother;

between the two, there is a whole story of castration represented by the

rusty scissors. But it so happens that the Arabs are an extensive, armed,

organized mass stretching across the entire desert; and the jackals are an

intense pack forever launching into the desert following lines of flight or

deterritorialization ("they are madmen, veritable madmen"); between the

two, at the edge, the Man of the North, the jackal-man. And aren't those big

scissors the Arab sign that guides or releases jackal-particles, both to accel-

erate their mad race by detaching them from the mass and to bring them

back to the mass, to tame them and whip them, to bring them around?

Dead camel: Oedipal food apparatus. Counter-Oedipal carrion apparatus:

kill animals to eat, or eat to clean up carrion. The jackals formulate the

problem well: it is not that of castration but of "cleanliness" (proprete, also

"ownness"), the test of desert-desire. Which will prevail, mass territoriality

or pack deterritorialization? The libido suffuses the entire desert, the body

without organs on which the drama is played out.

There are no individual statements, there never are. Every statement is

the product of a machinic assemblage, in other words, of collective agents

of enunciation (take "collective agents" to mean not peoples or societies

but multiplicities). The proper name (nom propre) does not designate an

individual: it is on the contrary when the individual opens up to the multi-

plicities pervading him or her, at the outcome of the most severe operation

of depersonalization, that he or she acquires his or her true proper name.

The proper name is the instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity. The

proper name is the subject of a pure infinitive comprehended as such in a

field of intensity. What Proust said about the first name: when I said

Gilberte's name, I had the impression that I was holding her entire body

naked in my mouth. The Wolf-Man, a true proper name, an intimate first

8 □ 1914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES?

name linked to the becomings, infinitives, and intensities of a multiplied

and depersonalized individual. What does psychoanalysis know about

multiplication? The desert hour when the dromedary becomes a thousand

dromedaries snickering in the sky. The evening hour when a thousand

holes appear on the surface of the earth. Castration! Castration! cries the

psychoanalytic scarecrow, who never saw more than a hole, a father or a

dog where wolves are, a domesticated individual where there are wild mul-

tiplicities. We are not just criticizing psychoanalysis for having selected

Oedipal statements exclusively. For such statements are to a certain extent

part of a machinic assemblage, for which they could serve as correctional

indexes, as in a calculation of errors. We are criticizing psychoanalysis for

having used Oedipal enunciation to make patients believe they would pro-

duce individual, personal statements, and would finally speak in their own

name. The trap was set from the start: never will the Wolf-Man speak. Talk

as he might about wolves, howl as he might like a wolf, Freud does not even

listen; he glances at his dog and answers, "It's daddy." For as long as that

lasts, Freud calls it neurosis; when it cracks, it's psychosis. The Wolf-Man

will receive the psychoanalytic medal of honor for services rendered to the

cause, and even disabled veterans' benefits. He could have spoken in his

own name only if the machinic assemblage that was producing particular

statements in him had been brought to light. But there is no question of that

in psychoanalysis: at the very moment the subject is persuaded that he or

she will be uttering the most individual of statements, he or she is deprived

of all basis for enunciation. Silence people, prevent them from speaking,

and above all, when they do speak, pretend they haven't said a thing: the

famous psychoanalytic neutrality. The Wolf-Man keeps howling: Six

wolves! Seven wolves! Freud says, How's that? Goats, you say? How inter-

esting. Take away the goats and all you have left is a wolf, so it's your

father ... That is why the Wolf-Man feels so fatigued: he's left lying there

with all his wolves in his throat, all those little holes on his nose, and all

those libidi-nal values on his body without organs. The war will come, the

wolves will become Bolsheviks, and the Wolf-Man will remain suffocated

by all he had to say. All we will be told is that he became well behaved,

polite, and resigned again, "honest and scrupulous." In short, cured. He

gets back by pointing out that psychoanalysis lacks a truly zoological

vision: "Nothing can be more valuable for a young person than the love of

nature and a comprehension of the natural sciences, in particular

zoology."

0 □ 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

The same Professor Challenger who made the Earth scream with his pain

machine, as described by Arthur Conan Doyle, gave a lecture after mixing

several textbooks on geology and biology in a fashion befitting his simian

disposition. He explained that the Earth—the Deterritorialized, the

Glacial, the giant Molecule—is a body without organs. This body without

organs is permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in all direc-

tions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad or transitory par-

ticles. That, however, was not the question at hand. For there simultane-

ously occurs upon the earth a very important, inevitable phenomenon that

is beneficial in many respects and unfortunate in many others: stratifica-

tion. Strata are Layers, Belts. They consist of giving form to matters, of

imprisoning intensities or locking singularities into systems of resonance

and redundancy, of producing upon the body of the earth molecules large

and small and organizing them into molar aggregates. Strata are acts of

capture, they are like "black holes" or occlusions striving to seize whatever

comes within their reach.

They operate by coding and territorialization

upon the earth; they proceed simultaneously by code and by territoriality.

The strata are judgments of God; stratification in general is the entire sys-

tem of the judgment of God (but the earth, or the body without organs, con-

stantly eludes that judgment, flees and becomes destratified, decoded,

deterritorialized).

Challenger quoted a sentence he said he came across in a geology text-

book. He said we needed to learn it by heart because we would only be in a

position to understand it later on: "A surface of stratification is a more

compact plane of consistency lying between two layers." The layers are the

strata. They come at least in pairs, one serving as substratum for the other.

The surface of stratification is a machinic assemblage distinct from the

strata. The assemblage is between two layers, between two strata; on one

side it faces the strata (in this direction, the assemblage is an interstratum),

but the other side faces something else, the body without organs or plane of

consistency (here, it is a metastratum). In effect, the body without organs is

itself the plane of consistency, which becomes compact or thickens at the

level of the strata.

God is a Lobster, or a double pincer, a double bind. Not only do strata

come at least in pairs, but in a different way each stratum is double (it itself

has several layers). Each stratum exhibits phenomena constitutive of dou-
ble articulation. Articulate twice, B-A, BA. This is not at all to say that the

strata speak or are language based. Double articulation is so extremely var-

iable that we cannot begin with a general model, only a relatively simple

case. The first articulation chooses or deducts, from unstable

particle-flows, metastable molecular or quasi-molecular units
{substances) upon which it imposes a statistical order of connections and

successions (forms).

0,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS □ 41

The second articulation establishes functional, compact, stable structures
(forms), and constructs the molar compounds in which these structures are

simultaneously actualized {substances). In a geological stratum, for exam-

ple, the first articulation is the process of "sedimentation," which deposits

units of cyclic sediment according to a statistical order: flysch, with its

succession of sandstone and schist. The second articulation is the "fold-

ing" that sets up a stable functional structure and effects the passage from

sediment to sedimentary rock.

It is clear that the distinction between the two articulations is not

between substances and forms. Substances are nothing other than formed

matters. Forms imply a code, modes of coding and decoding. Substances as

formed matters refer to territorialities and degrees of territorialization and

deterritorialization. But each articulation has a code and a territoriality;

therefore each possesses both form and substance. For now, all we can say is

that each articulation has a corresponding type of segmentarity or multi-

plicity: one type is supple, more molecular, and merely ordered; the other is

more rigid, molar, and organized. Although the first articulation is not

lacking in systematic interactions, it is in the second articulation in partic-

ular that phenomena constituting an overcoding are produced, phenom-

ena of centering, unification, totalization, integration, hierarchization,

and finalization. Both articulations establish binary relations between

their respective segments. But between the segments of one articulation

and the segments of the other there are biunivocal relationships obeying far

more complex laws. The word "structure" may be used to designate the

sum of these relations and relationships, but it is an illusion to believe that

structure is the earth's last word. Moreover, it cannot be taken for granted

that the distinction between the two articulations is always that of the

molecular and the molar.

He skipped over the immense diversity of the energetic,

physico-chemical, and geological strata. He went straight to the organic

strata, or the existence of a great organic stratification. The problem of

the organism—how to "make" the body an organism—is once again a

problem of articulation, of the articulatory relation. The Dogons, well

known to the professor, formulate the problem as follows: an organism

befalls the body of the smith, by virtue of a machine or machinic

assemblage that stratifies it. "The shock of the hammer and the anvil

broke his arms and legs at the elbows and knees, which until that

moment he had not possessed. In this way, he received the articulations

specific to the new human form that was to spread across the earth, a form

dedicated to work.... His arm became folded with a view to work."

It is

obviously only a manner of speaking to limit the articulatory relation to

the bones. The entire organism must be considered in relation to a

double articulation, and on different levels.

2 D 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

First, on the level of morphogenesis: on the one hand, realities of the

molecular type with aleatory relations are caught up in crowd phenomena

or statistical aggregates determining an order (the protein fiber and its

sequence or segmentarity); on the other hand, these aggregates themselves

are taken up into stable structures that "elect" stereoscopic compounds,

form organs, functions, and regulations, organize molar mechanisms, and

even distribute centers capable of overflying crowds, overseeing mecha-

nisms, utilizing and repairing tools, "overcoding" the aggregate (the fold-

ing back on itself of the fiber to form a compact structure; a second kind of

segmentarity).

Sedimentation and folding, fiber and infolding.

On a different level, the cellular chemistry presiding over the constitu-

tion of proteins also operates by double articulation. This double articula-

tion is internal to the molecular, it is the articulation between small and

large molecules, a segmentarity by successive modifications and polymeri-

zation. "First, the elements taken from the medium are combined through

a series of transformations.. . .All this activity involves hundreds of chem-

ical reactions. But ultimately, it produces a limited number of small com-

pounds, a few dozen at most. In the second stage of cellular chemistry, the

small molecules are assembled to produce larger ones. It is the polymeriza-

tion of units linked end-to-end that forms the characteristic chains of

mac-romolecules. . .. The two stages of cellular chemistry, therefore,

differ in their function, products and nature. The first carves out chemical

motifs; the second assembles them. The first forms compounds that exist

only temporarily, for they are intermediaries on the path of biosynthesis;

the second constructs stable products. The first operates by a series of

different reactions; the second by repeating the same reaction."

There is,

moreover, a third level, upon which cellular chemistry itself depends. It is

the genetic code, which is in turn inseparable from a double segmentarity

or a double articulation, this time between two types of independent

molecules: the sequence of protein units and the sequence of nucleic

units, with binary relations between units of the same type and

biunivocal relationships between units of different types. Thus there are

always two articulations, two segmentarities, two kinds of multiplicity,

each of which brings into play both forms and substances. But the

distribution of these two articulations is not constant, even within the

same stratum.

The audience rather sulkily denounced the numerous misunderstand-

ings, misinterpretations, and even misappropriations in the professor's

presentation, despite the authorities he had appealed to, calling them his

"friends." Even the Dogons . . . And things would presently get worse. The

professor cynically congratulated himself on taking his pleasure from

behind, but the offspring always turned out to be runts and wens, bits and

pieces, if not stupid vulgarizations. Besides, the professor was not a geolo-

0,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS □ 43

gist or a biologist, he was not even a linguist, ethnologist, or psychoanalyst;

what his specialty had been was long since forgotten. In fact, Professor

Challenger was double, articulated twice, and that did not make things any

easier, people never knew which of him was present. He (?) claimed to have

invented a discipline he referred to by various names: rhizomatics,

stratoanalysis, schizoanalysis, nomadology, micropolitics, pragmatics, the

science of multiplicities. Yet no one clearly understood what the goals,

method, or principles of this discipline were. Young Professor Alasca,

Challenger's pet student, tried hypocritically to defend him by explaining

that on a given stratum the passage from one articulation to the other was

easily verified because it was always accompanied by a loss of water, in

genetics as in geology, and even in linguistics, where the importance of the

"lost saliva" phenomenon is measured. Challenger took offense, preferring

to cite his friend, as he called him, the Danish Spinozist geologist,

Hjelmslev, that dark prince descended from Hamlet who also made lan-

guage his concern, precisely in order to analyze its "stratification."

Hjelmslev was able to weave a net out of the notions of matter, content and
expression,form and substance. These were the strata, said Hjelmslev. Now

this net had the advantage of breaking with the form-content duality, since

there was a form of content no less than a form of expression. Hjelmslev's

enemies saw this merely as a way of rebaptizing the discredited notions of

the signified and signifier, but something quite different was actually going

on. Despite what Hjelmslev himself may have said, the net is not linguistic

in scope or origin (the same must be said of double articulation: if language

has a specificity of its own, as it most certainly does, that specificity con-

sists neither in double articulation nor in Hjelmslev's net, which are gen-

eral characteristics of strata).

He used the term matter for the plane of consistency or Body without

Organs, in other words, the unformed, unorganized, nonstratified, or

destratified body and all its flows: subatomic and submolecular particles,

pure intensities, prevital and prephysical free singularities. He used the

term content for formed matters, which would now have to be considered

from two points of view: substance, insofar as these matters are "chosen,"

and form, insofar as they are chosen in a certain order {substance and form
of content). He used the term expression for functional structures, which

would also have to be considered from two points of view: the organization

of their own specific form, and substances insofar as they form compounds
(form and content of expression). A stratum always has a dimension of the

expressible or of expression serving as the basis for a relative invariance;

for example, nucleic sequences are inseparable from a relatively invariant

expression by means of which they determine the compounds, organs, and

functions of the organism.

To express is always to sing the glory of God.

4 □ 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

Every stratum is a judgment of God; not only do plants and animals,

orchids and wasps, sing or express themselves, but so do rocks and even riv-

ers, every stratified thing on earth. The first articulation concerns content,
the second expression. The distinction between the two articulations is not

between forms and substances but between content and expression,

expression having just as much substance as content and content just as

much form as expression. The double articulation sometimes coincides

with the molecular and the molar, and sometimes not; this is because con-

tent and expression are sometimes divided along those lines and some-

times along different lines. There is never correspondence or conformity

between content and expression, only isomorphism with reciprocal pre-

supposition. The distinction between content and expression is always
real, in various ways, but it cannot be said that the terms preexist their dou-

ble articulation. It is the double articulation that distributes them accord-

ing to the line it draws in each stratum; it is what constitutes their real

distinction. (On the other hand, there is no real distinction between form

and substance, only a mental or modal distinction: since substances are

nothing other than formed matters, formless substances are inconceivable,

although it is possible in certain instances to conceive of substanceless

forms.)

Even though there is a real distinction between them, content and

expression are relative terms ("first" and "second" articulation should also

be understood in an entirely relative fashion). Even though it is capable of

invariance, expression is just as much a variable as content. Content and

expression are two variables of a function of stratification. They not only

vary from one stratum to another, but intermingle, and within the same

stratum multiply and divide ad infinitum. Since every articulation is dou-

ble, there is not an articulation of content and an articulation of

expression—the articulation of content is double in its own right and con-

stitutes a relative expression within content; the articulation of expression

is also double and constitutes a relative content within expression. For this

reason, there exist intermediate states between content and expression,

expression and content: the levels, equilibriums, and exchanges through

which a stratified system passes. In short, we find forms and substances of

content that play the role of expression in relation to other forms and sub-

stances, and conversely for expression. These new distinctions do not,

therefore, coincide with the distinction between forms and substances

within each articulation; instead, they show that each articulation is

already, or still, double. This can be seen on the organic stratum: proteins

of content have two forms, one of which (the infolded fiber) plays the role

of functional expression in relation to the other. The same goes for the

nucleic acids of expression: double articulations cause certain formal and

10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS □ 45

substantial elements to play the role of content in relation to others; not

only does the half of the chain that is reproduced become a content, but the

reconstituted chain itself becomes a content in relation to the "messenger."

There are double pincers everywhere on a stratum; everywhere and in all

directions there are double binds and lobsters, a multiplicity of double

articulations affecting both expression and content. Through all of this,

Hjelmslev's warning should not be forgotten: "The terms expression plane

and content plane ... are chosen in conformity with established notions

and are quite arbitrary. Their functional definition provides no justifica-

tion for calling one, and not the other, of these entities expression, or one,

and not the other, content. They are defined only by their mutual solidarity,

and neither of them can be identified otherwise. They are defined only

oppositively and relatively, as mutually opposed functives of one and the

same function."

We must combine all the resources of real distinction,

reciprocal presupposition, and general relativism.

The question we must ask is what on a given stratum varies and what

does not. What accounts for the unity and diversity of a stratum? Matter,

the pure matter of the plane of consistency (or inconsistency) lies outside

the strata. The molecular materials borrowed from the substrata may be

the same throughout a stratum, but that does not mean that the molecules

will be the same. The substantial elements may be the same throughout the

stratum without the substances being the same. The formal relations or

bonds may be the same without the forms being the same. In biochemistry,

there is a unity of composition of the organic stratum defined at the level of

materials and energy, substantial elements or radicals, bonds and reac-

tions. But there is a variety of different molecules, substances, and forms.

Should we not sing the praise of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire? For in the nine-

teenth century he developed a grandiose conception of stratification. He

said that matter, considered from the standpoint of its greatest divisibility,

consists in particles of decreasing size, flows or elastic fluids that "deploy

themselves" by radiating through space. Combustion is the process of this

escape or infinite division on the plane of consistency. Electrification is the

opposite process, constitutive of strata; it is the process whereby similar

particles group together to form atoms and molecules, similar molecules to

form bigger molecules, and the biggest molecules to form molar aggregates:

"the attraction of like by like," as in a double pincer or double articulation.

Thus there is no vital matter specific to the organic stratum, matter is the

same on all the strata. But the organic stratum does have a specific unity of

composition, a single abstract Animal, a single machine embedded in the

stratum, and presents everywhere the same molecular materials, the same

elements or anatomical components of organs, the same formal connec-

6 □ 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

tions. Organic forms are nevertheless different from one another, as are

organs, compound substances, and molecules. It is of little or no impor-

tance that Geoffroy chose anatomical elements as the substantial units

rather than protein and nucleic acid radicals. At any rate, he already

invoked a whole interplay of molecules. The important thing is the princi-

ple of the simultaneous unity and variety of the stratum: isomorphism of

forms but no correspondence; identity of elements or components but no

identity of compound substances.

This is where the dialogue, or rather violent debate, with Cuvier came

in. To keep the last of the audience from leaving, Challenger imagined a

particularly epistemological dialogue of the dead, in puppet theater style.

Geoffroy called forth Monsters, Cuvier laid out all the Fossils in order,

Baer flourished flasks filled with embryos, Vialleton put on a tetrapod's

belt, Perrier mimed the dramatic battle between the Mouth and the Brain,

and so on. Geoffroy: The proof that there is isomorphism is that you can

always get from one form on the organic stratum to another, however dif-

ferent they may be, by means of "folding." To go from the Vertebrate to the

Cephalopod, bring the two sides of the Vertebrate's backbone together,

bend its head down to its feet and its pelvis up to the nape of its neck ...
Cuvier (angrily): That's just not true! You go from an Elephant to a

Medusa; I know, I tried. There are irreducible axes, types, branches. There

are resemblances between organs and analogies between forms, nothing

more. You're a falsifier, a metaphysician. Vialleton (a disciple of Cuvier

and Baer): Even if folding gave good results, who could endure it? It's not

by chance that Geoffroy only considers anatomical elements. No muscle or

ligament would survive it. Geoffroy. I said that there was isomorphism but

not correspondence. You have to bring "degrees of development or perfec-

tion" into the picture. It is not everywhere on a stratum that materials

reach the degree at which they form a given aggregate. Anatomical ele-

ments may be arrested or inhibited in certain places by molecular clashes,

the influence of the milieu, or pressure from neighbors to such an extent

that they compose different organs. The same formal relations or connec-

tions are then effectuated in entirely different forms and arrangements. It

is still the same abstract Animal that is realized throughout the stratum,

only to varying degrees, in varying modes. Each time, it is as perfect as its

surroundings or milieu allows it to be (it is obviously not yet a question of

evolution: neither folding nor degrees imply descent or derivation, only

autonomous realizations of the same abstract relations). This is where

Geoffroy invoked Monsters: human monsters are embryos that were

retarded at a certain degree of development, the human in them is only a

straitjacket for inhuman forms and substances. Yes, the Heteradelph is a

crustacean. Baer (an ally of Cuvier and contemporary of Darwin, about

0,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS □ 47

whom he had reservations, in addition to being an enemy of Geoffroy):

That's not true, you can't confuse degrees of development with types of

forms. A single type has several degrees, a single degree is found in several

types, but never will you make types out of degrees. An embryo of one type

cannot display another type; at most, it can be of the same degree as an

embryo of the second type. Vialleton (a disciple of Baer's who took both

Darwin and Geoffroy one further): And then there are things that only an

embryo can do or endure. It can do or endure these things precisely because

of its type, not because it can go from one type to another according to

degrees of development. Admire the Tortoise. Its neck requires that a cer-

tain number of protovertebrae change position, and its front limbs must

slide 180 degrees in relation to that of a bird. You can never draw conclu-

sions about phylogenesis on the basis of embryogenesis. Folding does not

make it possible to go from one type to another; quite the contrary, the

types testify to the irreducibility of the forms of folding ... (Thus Vialleton

presented two kinds of interconnected arguments in the service of the same

cause, saying first that there are things no animal can do by reason of its

substance, and then that there are things that only an embryo can do by rea-

son of its form. Two strong arguments.)

We're a little lost now. There is so much going on in these retorts. So

many endlessly proliferating distinctions. So much getting even, for

episte-mology is not innocent. The sweet and subtle Geoffroy and the

violent and serious Cuvier do battle around Napoleon. Cuvier, the rigid

specialist, is pitted against Geoffroy, always ready to switch specialities.

Cuvier hates Geoffroy, he can't stomach Geoffroy's lighthearted

formulas, his humor (yes, Hens do indeed have teeth, the Lobster has

skin on its bones, etc.). Cuvier is a man of Power and Terrain, and he

won't let Geoffroy forget it; Geoffroy, on the other hand, prefigures the

nomadic man of speed. Cuvier reflects a Euclidean space, whereas

Geoffroy thinks topologically. Today let us invoke the folds of the cortex

with all their paradoxes. Strata are topological, and Geoffroy is a great

artist of the fold, a formidable artist; as such, he already has a

presentiment of a certain kind of animal rhizome with aberrant paths of

communication—Monsters. Cuvier reacts in terms of discontinuous

photographs, and casts of fossils. But we're a little lost, because

distinctions have proliferated in all directions.

We have not even taken Darwin, evolutionism, or neoevolutionism into

account yet. This, however, is where a decisive phenomenon occurs: our

puppet theater becomes more and more nebulous, in other words, collec-

tive and differential. Earlier, we invoked two factors, and their uncertain

relations, in order to explain the diversity within a stratum—degrees of

development or perfection and types of forms. They now undergo a pro-

found transformation. There is a double tendency for types of forms to be

8 □ 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

understood increasingly in terms of populations, packs and colonies,

collectivities or multiplicities; and degrees of development in terms of

speeds, rates, coefficients, and differential relations. A double deepening.

This, Darwinism's fundamental contribution, implies a new coupling of

individuals and milieus on the stratum.

First, if we assume the presence of an elementary or even molecular pop-

ulation in a given milieu, the forms do not preexist the population, they are

more like statistical results. The more a population assumes divergent

forms, the more its multiplicity divides into multiplicities of different

nature, the more its elements form distinct compounds or matters—the

more efficiently it distributes itself in the milieu, or divides up the milieu.

Thus the relationship between embryogenesis and phylogenesis is

reversed: the embryo does not testify to an absolute form preestablished in

a closed milieu; rather, the phylogenesis of populations has at its disposal,

in an open milieu, an entire range of relative forms to choose from, none of

which is preestablished. In embryogenesis, "It is possible to tell from the

parents, anticipating the outcome of the process, whether a pigeon or a wolf

is developing.... But here the points of reference themselves are in

motion: there are only fixed points for convenience of expression. At the

level of universal evolution, it is impossible to discern that kind of refer-

ence point.... Life on earth appears as a sum of relatively independent

species of flora and fauna with sometimes shifting or porous boundaries

between them. Geographical areas can only harbor a sort of chaos, or, at

best, extrinsic harmonies of an ecological order, temporary equilibriums

between populations."

Second, simultaneously and under the same conditions, the degrees are

not degrees of preexistent development or perfection but are instead global

and relative equilibriums: they enter into play as a function of the advan-

tage they give particular elements, then a particular multiplicity in the

milieu, and as a function of a particular variation in the milieu. Degrees are

no longer measured in terms of increasing perfection or a differentiation

and increase in the complexity of the parts, but in terms of differential rela-

tions and coefficients such as selective pressure, catalytic action, speed of

propagation, rate of growth, evolution, mutation, etc. Relative progress,

then, can occur by formal and quantitative simplification rather than by

complication, by a loss of components and syntheses rather than by acqui-

sition (it is a question of speed, and speed is a differential). It is through

populations that one is formed, assumes forms, and through loss that one

progresses and picks up speed. Darwinism's two fundamental contribu-

tions move in the direction of a science of multiplicities: the substitution of

populations for types, and the substitution of rates or differential relations

for degrees.

These are nomadic contributions with shifting boundaries

0,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS □ 49

determined by populations or variations of multiplicities, and with differ-

ential coefficients or variations of relations. Contemporary biochemistry,

or "molecular Darwinism" as Monod calls it, confirms, on the level of a

single statistical and global individual, or a simple sample, the decisive

importance of molecular populations and microbiological rates (for exam-

ple, the endlessness of the sequence composing a chain, and the chance var-

iation of a single segment in the sequence).

Challenger admitted having digressed at length but added that there was

no possible way to distinguish between the digressive and the

nondi-gressive. The point was to arrive at several conclusions

concerning the unity and diversity of a single stratum, in this case the

organic stratum.

To begin with, a stratum does indeed have a unity of composition, which

is what allows it to be called a stratum: molecular materials, substantial ele-

ments, and formal relations or traits. Materials are not the same as the

unformed matter of the plane of consistency; they are already stratified,

and come from "substrata." But of course substrata should not be thought

of only as substrata: in particular, their organization is no less complex

than, nor is it inferior to, that of the strata; we should be on our guard

against any kind of ridiculous cosmic evolutionism. The materials fur-

nished by a substratum are no doubt simpler than the compounds of a stra-

tum, but their level of organization in the substratum is no lower than that

of the stratum itself. The difference between materials and substantial ele-

ments is one of organization; there is a change in organization, not an aug-

mentation. The materials furnished by the substratum constitute an
exterior milieu for the elements and compounds of the stratum under con-

sideration, but they are not exterior to the stratum. The elements and com-

pounds constitute an interior of the stratum, just as the materials

constitute an exterior of the stratum; both belong to the stratum, the latter

because they are materials that have been furnished to the stratum and

selected for it, the former because they are formed from the materials.

Once again, this exterior and interior are relative; they exist only through

their exchanges and therefore only by virtue of the stratum responsible for

the relation between them. For example, on a crystalline stratum, the

amorphous milieu, or medium, is exterior to the seed before the crystal has

formed; the crystal forms by interiorizing and incorporating masses of

amorphous material. Conversely, the interiority of the seed of the crystal

must move out to the system's exterior, where the amorphous medium can

crystallize (the aptitude to switch over to the other form of organization).

To the point that the seed itself comes from the outside. In short, both exte-

rior and interior are interior to the stratum. The same applies to the organic

stratum: the materials furnished by the substrata are an exterior medium

constituting the famous prebiotic soup, and catalysts play the role of seed

0 □ 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

in the formation of interior substantial elements or even compounds.

These elements and compounds both appropriate materials and exteri-

orize themselves through replication, even in the conditions of the primor-

dial soup itself. Once again, interior and exterior exchange places, and both

are interior to the organic stratum. The limit between them is the mem-

brane that regulates the exchanges and transformation in organization (in

other words, the distributions interior to the stratum) and that defines all

of the stratum's formal relations or traits (even though the situation and

role of the limit vary widely depending on the stratum, for example, the

limit of the crystal as compared to the cellular membrane). We may there-

fore use the term central layer, or central ring, for the following aggregate

comprising the unity of composition of a stratum: exterior molecular

materials, interior substantial elements, and the limit or membrane con-

veying the formal relations. There is a single abstract machine that is envel-

oped by the stratum and constitutes its unity. This is the Ecumenon, as

opposed to the Planomenon of the plane of consistency.

It would be a mistake to believe that it is possible to isolate this unitary,

central layer of the stratum, or to grasp it in itself, by regression. In the first

place, a stratum necessarily goes from layer to layer, and from the very

beginning. It already has several layers. It goes from a center to a periphery,

at the same time as the periphery reacts back upon the center to form a new

center in relation to a new periphery. Flows constantly radiate outward,

then turn back. There is an outgrowth and multiplication of intermediate

states, and this process is one of the local conditions of the central ring

(different concentrations, variations that are tolerated below a certain

threshold of identity). These intermediate states present new figures of

milieus or materials, as well as of elements and compounds. They are inter-

mediaries between the exterior milieu and the interior element, substantial

elements and their compounds, compounds and substances, and between

the different formed substances (substances of content and substances of

expression). We will use the term epistrata for these intermediaries and

superpositions, these outgrowths, these levels. Returning to our two exam-

ples, on the crystalline stratum there are many intermediaries between the

exterior milieu or material and the interior seed: a multiplicity of perfectly

discontinuous states of metastability constituting so many hierarchical

degrees. Neither is the organic stratum separable from so-called interior

milieus that are interior elements in relation to exterior materials but also

exterior elements in relation to interior substances." These internal

organic milieus are known to regulate the degree of complexity or differen-

tiation of the parts of an organism. A stratum, considered from the stand-

point of its unity of composition, therefore exists only in its substantial

epistrata, which shatter its continuity, fragment its ring, and break it down

0,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS □ 51

into gradations. The central ring does not exist independently of a periph-

ery that forms a new center, reacts back upon the first center, and in turn

gives forth discontinuous epistrata.

That is not all. In addition to this new or second-degree relativity of inte-

rior and exterior, there is a whole history on the level of the membrane or

limit. To the extent that elements and compounds incorporate or appropri-

ate materials, the corresponding organisms are forced to turn to other

"more foreign and less convenient" materials that they take from still

intact masses or other organisms. The milieu assumes a third figure here: it

is no longer an interior or exterior milieu, even a relative one, nor an inter-

mediate milieu, but instead an annexed or associated milieu. Associated

milieus imply sources of energy different from alimentary materials.

Before these sources are obtained, the organism can be said to nourish

itself but not to breathe: it is in a state of suffocation.

Obtaining an energy

source permits an increase in the number of materials that can be trans-

formed into elements and compounds. The associated milieu is thus

defined by the capture of energy sources (respiration in the most general

sense), by the discernment of materials, the sensing of their presence or

absence (perception), and by the fabrication or nonfabrication of the corre-

sponding compounds (response, reaction). That there are molecular per-

ceptions no less than molecular reactions can be seen in the economy of the

cell and the property of regulatory agents to "recognize" only one or two

kinds of chemicals in a very diverse milieu of exteriority. The development

of the associated milieus culminates in the animal worlds described by von

Uexkull, with all their active, perceptive, and energetic characteristics.

The unforgettable associated world of the Tick, defined by its gravitational

energy of falling, its olfactory characteristic of perceiving sweat, and its

active characteristic of latching on: the tick climbs a branch and drops onto

a passing mammal it has recognized by smell, then latches onto its skin (an

associated world composed of three factors, and no more). Active and per-

ceptive characteristics are themselves something of a double pincer, a dou-

ble articulation.

Here, the associated milieus are closely related to organic forms. An

organic form is not a simple structure but a structuration, the constitution

of an associated milieu. An animal milieu, such as the spider web, is no less

"morphogenetic" than the form of the organism. One certainly cannot say

that the milieu determines the form; but to complicate things, this does not

make the relation between form and milieu any less decisive. Since the

form depends on an autonomous code, it can only be constituted in an

associated milieu that interlaces active, perceptive, and energetic charac-

teristics in a complex fashion, in conformity with the code's requirements;

and the form can develop only through intermediary milieus that regulate

52 D 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

the speeds and rates of its substances; and it can experience itself only in a

milieu of exteriority that measures the comparative advantages of the asso-

ciated milieus and the differential relations of the intermediary milieus.

Milieus always act, through selection, on entire organisms, the forms of

which depend on codes those milieus sanction indirectly. Associated

milieus divide a single milieu of exteriority among themselves as a func-

tion of different forms, just as intermediate milieus divide a milieu of

exteriority among themselves as a function of the rates or degrees of a sin-

gle form. But the dividing is done differently in the two cases. In relation to

the central belt of the stratum, the intermediate strata or milieus constitute

"epistrata" piled one atop the other, and form new centers for the new

peripheries. We will apply the term "parastrata" to the second way in which

the central belt fragments into sides and "besides," and the irreducible

forms and milieus associated with them. This time, it is at the level of the

limit or membrane of the central belt that the formal relations or traits

common to all of the strata necessarily assume entirely different forms or

types of forms corresponding to the parastrata. A stratum exists only in its

epistrata and parastrata, so that in the final analysis these must be consid-

ered strata in their own right. The ideally continuous belt or ring of the

stratum—the Ecumenon defined by the identity of molecular materials,

substantial elements, and formal relations—exists only as shattered, frag-

mented into epistrata and parastrata that imply concrete machines and

their respective indexes, and constitute different molecules, specific sub-

stances, and irreducible forms.

We may now return to the two fundamental contributions of Darwinism

and answer the question of why forms or types of forms in the parastrata

must be understood in relation to populations, and degrees of develop-

ment in the epistrata as rates or differential relations. First, parastrata

envelop the very codes upon which the forms depend, and these codes nec-

essarily apply to populations. There must already be an entire molecular

population to be coded, and the effects of the code, or a change in the code,

are evaluated in relation to a more or less molar population, depending on

the code's ability to propagate in the milieu or create for itself a new associ-

ated milieu within which the modification will be popularizable. Yes, we

must always think in terms of packs and multiplicities: a code does or does

not take hold because the coded individual belongs to a certain population,

"the population inhabiting test tubes, a flask full of water, or a mammal's

intestine." What does it mean to say that new forms and associated milieus

potentially result from a change in the code, a modification of the code, or a

variation in the parastratum? The change is obviously not due to a passage

from one preestablished form to another, in other words, a translation

from one code to another. As long as the problem was formulated in that

10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS □ 53

fashion, it remained insoluble, and one would have to agree with Cuvier

and Baer that established types of forms are irreducible and therefore do

not admit of translation or transformation. But as soon as it is recognized

that a code is inseparable from a process of decoding that is inherent to it,

the problem receives a new formulation. There is no genetics without

"genetic drift." The modern theory of mutations has clearly demonstrated

that a code, which necessarily relates to a population, has an essential mar-

gin of decoding: not only does every code have supplements capable of free

variation, but a single segment may be copied twice, the second copy left

free for variation. In addition, fragments of code may be transferred from

the cells of one species to those of another, Man and Mouse, Monkey and

Cat, by viruses or through other procedures. This involves not translation

between codes (viruses are not translators) but a singular phenomenon we

call surplus value of code, or side-communication.'

We will have occasion

to discuss this further, for it is essential to all becomings-animal. Every

code is affected by a margin of decoding due to these supplements and sur-

plus values—supplements in the order of a multiplicity, surplus values in

the order of a rhizome. Forms in the parastrata, the parastrata themselves,

far from lying immobile and frozen upon the strata, are part of a machinic

interlock: they relate to populations, populations imply codes, and codes

fundamentally include phenomena of relative decoding that are all the

more usable, composable, and addable by virtue of being relative, always

"beside."

Forms relate to codes and processes of coding and decoding in the

parastrata; substances, being formed matters, relate to territorialities and

movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization on the

epis-trata. In truth, the epistrata are just as inseparable from the

movements that constitute them as the parastrata are from their

processes. Nomadic waves or flows of deterritorialization go from the

central layer to the periphery, then from the new center to the new

periphery, falling back to the old center and launching forth to the new.

The organization of the epistrata moves in the direction of increasing

deterritorialization. Physical particles and chemical substances cross

thresholds of deterritorialization on their own stratum and between strata;

these thresholds correspond to more or less stable intermediate states, to

more or less transitory valences and existences, to engagements with this

or that other body, to densities of proximity, to more or less localizable

connections. Not only are physical particles characterized by speeds of

deterritorialization—Joycean tachyons, particles-holes, and quarks

recalling the fundamental idea of the "soup"—but a single chemical

substance (sulfur or carbon, for example) has a number of more and less

deterritorialized states. The more interior milieus an organism has on its

own stratum, assuring its autonomy and

4 O 10,000

THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

bringing it into a set of aleatory relations with the exterior, the more

deterritorialized it is. That is why degrees of development must be under-

stood relatively, and as a function of differential speeds, relations, and

rates. Deterritorialization must be thought of as a perfectly positive power

that has degrees and thresholds (epistrata), is always relative, and has

reterritorialization as its flipside or complement. An organism that is

deterritorialized in relation to the exterior necessarily reterritorializes on

its interior milieus. A given presumed fragment of embryo is deterrito-

rialized when it changes thresholds or gradients, but is assigned a new role

by the new surroundings. Local movements are alterations. Cellular migra-

tion, stretching, invagination, folding are examples of this. Every voyage is

intensive, and occurs in relation to thresholds of intensity between which it

evolves or that it crosses. One travels by intensity; displacements and

spatial figures depend on intensive thresholds of nomadic deterritoriali-

zation (and thus on differential relations) that simultaneously define com-

plementary, sedentary reterritorializations. Every stratum operates this

way: by grasping in its pincers a maximum number of intensities or inten-

sive particles over which it spreads its forms and substances, constituting

determinate gradients and thresholds of resonance (deterritorialization on

a stratum always occurs in relation to a complementary reterrito-

rialization).

As long as preestablished forms were compared to predetermined

degrees, all one could do was affirm their irreducibility, and there was no

way of judging possible communication between the two factors. But we

see now that forms depend on codes in the parastrata and plunge into pro-

cesses of decoding or drift and that degrees themselves are caught up in

movements of intensive territorialization and reterritorialization. There is

no simple correspondence between codes and territorialities on the one

hand and decodings and deterritorialization on the other: on the contrary,

a code may be a deterritorialization and a reterritorialization a decoding.

Wide gaps separate code and territoriality. The two factors nevertheless

have the same "subject" in a stratum: it is populations that are deter-

ritorialized and reterritorialized, and also coded and decoded. In addition,

these factors communicate or interlace in the milieus.

On the one hand, modifications of a code have an aleatory cause in the

milieu of exteriority, and it is their effects on the interior milieus, their

compatibility with them, that decide whether they will be popularized.

Deterritorializations and reterritorializations do not bring about the mod-

ifications; they do, however, strictly determine their selection. On the other

hand, every modification has an associated milieu that in turn entails a

certain deterritorialization in relation to the milieu of exteriority and a cer-

tain reterritorialization on intermediate or interior milieus. Perceptions

0,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS □ 55

and actions in an associated milieu, even those on a molecular level, con-

struct or produce territorial signs (indexes). This is especially true of an ani-

mal world, which is constituted, marked off by signs that divide it into

zones (of shelter, hunting, neutrality, etc.), mobilize special organs, and

correspond to fragments of code; this is so even at the margin of decoding

inherent in the code. Even the domain of learning is defined by the code, or

prescribed by it. But indexes or territorial signs are inseparable from a dou-

ble movement. Since the associated milieu always confronts a milieu of

exteriority with which the animal is engaged and in which it takes neces-

sary risks, a line of flight must be preserved to enable the animal to regain

its associated milieu when danger appears (for example, the bull's line of

flight in the arena, which it uses to regain the turf it has chosen).

A second

kind of line of flight arises when the associated milieu is rocked by blows

from the exterior, forcing the animal to abandon it and strike up an associa-

tion with new portions of exteriority, this time leaning on its interior

milieus like fragile crutches. When the seas dried, the primitive Fish left its

associated milieu to explore land, forced to "stand on its own legs," now

carrying water only on the inside, in the amniotic membranes protecting

the embryo. In one way or the other, the animal is more a fleer than a

fighter, but its flights are also conquests, creations. Territorialities, then,

are shot through with lines of flight testifying to the presence within them

of movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. In a certain

sense, they are secondary. They would be nothing without these move-

ments that deposit them. In short, the epistrata and parastrata are continu-

ally moving, sliding, shifting, and changing on the Ecumenon or unity of

composition of a stratum; some are swept away by lines of flight and move-

ments of deterritorialization, others by processes of decoding or drift, but

they all communicate at the intersection of the milieus. The strata are con-

tinually being shaken by phenomena of cracking and rupture, either at the

level of the substrata that furnish the materials (a prebiotic soup, a

prechemical soup ...), at the level of the accumulating epistrata, or at the

level of the abutting parastrata: everywhere there arise simultaneous accel-

erations and blockages, comparative speeds, differences in deterrito-

rialization creating relative fields of reterritorialization.

These relative movements should most assuredly not be confused with

the possibility of absolute deterritorialization, an absolute line of flight,

absolute drift. The former are stratic or interstratic, whereas the latter con-

cern the plane of consistency and its destratification (its "combustion," as

Geoffroy would say). There is no doubt that mad physical particles crash

through the strata as they accelerate, leaving minimal trace of their pas-

sage, escaping spatiotemporal and even existential coordinates as they

tend toward a state of absolute deterritorialization, the state of unformed

6 □ 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

matter on the plane of consistency. In a certain sense, the acceleration of

relative deterritorializations reaches the sound barrier: if the particles

bounce off this wall, or allow themselves to be captured by black holes, they

fall back onto the strata, into the strata's relations and milieus; but if they

cross the barrier they reach the unformed, destratified element of the plane

of consistency. We may even say the the abstract machines that emit and
combine particles have two very different modes of existence: the Ecumenon
and the Planomenon. Either the abstract machines remain prisoner to

stratifications, are enveloped in a certain specific stratum whose program

or unity of composition they define (the abstract Animal, the abstract

chemical Body, Energy in itself) and whose movements of relative

deterritorialization they regulate, Or, on the contrary, the abstract machine

cuts across all stratifications, develops alone and in its own right on the

plane of consistency whose diagram it constitutes, the same machine at

work in astrophysics and in microphysics, in the natural and in the artifi-

cial, piloting flows of absolute deterritorialization (in no sense, of course, is

unformed matter chaos of any kind). But this presentation is still too

simplified.

First, one does not go from the relative to the absolute simply by acceler-

ation, even though increases in speed tend to have this comparative and

global result. Absolute deterritorialization is not defined as a giant acceler-

ator; its absoluteness does not hinge on how fast it goes. It is actually possi-

ble to reach the absolute by way of phenomena of relative slowness or delay.

Retarded development is an example. What qualifies a deterritorialization

is not its speed (some are very slow) but its nature, whether it constitutes

epistrata and parastrata and proceeds by articulated segments or, on the

contrary, jumps from one singularity to another following a

nondecom-posable, nonsegmentary line drawing a metastratum of the plane

of consistency. Second, under no circumstances must it be thought that

absolute deterritorialization comes suddenly of afterward, is in excess or

beyond. That would preclude any understanding of why the strata

themselves are animated by movements of relative deterritorialization and

decoding that are not like accidents occurring on them. In fact, what is

primary is an absolute deterritorialization an absolute line of flight,

however complex or multiple—that of the plane of consistency or body

without organs (the Earth, the absolutely deterritorialized). This absolute

deterritorialization becomes relative only after stratification occurs on

that plane or body: It is the strata that are always residue, not the

opposite. The question is not how something manages to leave the strata

by how things get into them in the first place. There is a perpetual

immanence of absolute deterritorialization within relative

deterritorialization; and the machinic assemblages between strata that

regulate the differential relations and relative

0,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS □ 57

movements also have cutting edges of deterritorialization oriented toward

the absolute. The plane of consistency is always immanent to the strata; the

two states of the abstract machine always coexist as two different states of

intensities.

Most of the audience had left (the first to go were the Marinetians with

their double articulation, followed by the Hjelmslevians with their content

and expression, and the biologists with their proteins and nucleic acids).

The only ones left were the mathematicians, accustomed to other follies,

along with a few astrologers, archaeologists, and scattered individuals.

Challenger, moreover, had changed since the beginning of his talk. His

voice had become hoarser, broken occasionally by an apish cough. His

dream was not so much to give a lecture to humans as to provide a program

for pure computers. Or else he was dreaming of an axiomatic, for

axi-omatics deals essentially with stratification. Challenger was

addressing himself to memory only. Now that we had discussed what was

constant and what varied in a stratum from the standpoint of substances

and forms, the question remaining to be answered was what varied

between strata from the standpoint of content and expression. For if it is

true that there is always a real distinction constitutive of double

articulation, a reciprocal presupposition of content and expression, then

what varies from one stratum to another is the nature of this real

distinction, and the nature and respective positions of the terms

distinguished. Let us start with a certain group of strata that can be

characterized summarily as follows: on these strata, content (form and

substance) is molecular, and expression (form and substance) is molar.

The difference between the two is primarily one of order of magnitude or

scale. Resonance, or the communication occurring between the two

independent orders, is what institutes the stratified system. The molecular

content of that system has its own form corresponding to the distribution

of elemental masses and the action of one molecule upon another;

similarly, expression has a form manifesting the statistical aggregate and

state of equilibrium existing on the macroscopic level. Expression is like

an "operation of amplifying structuration carrying the active properties of

the originally microphysical discontinuity to the macrophysical level."

We took as our point of departure cases of this kind on the geological

stratum, the crystalline stratum, and physicochemical strata, wherever the

molar can be said to express microscopic molecular interactions ("the crys-

tal is the macroscopic expression of a microscopic structure"; the "crystal-

line form expresses certain atomic or molecular characteristics of the

constituent chemical categories"). Of course, this still leaves numerous

possibilities, depending on the number and nature of the intermediate

8 □ 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

states, and also on the impact of exterior forces on the formation of expres-

sion. There may be a greater or lesser number of intermediate states

between the molecular and the molar; there may be a greater or lesser num-

ber of exterior forces or organizing centers participating in the molar form.

Doubtless, these two factors are in an inverse relation to each other and

indicate limit-cases. For example, the molar form of expression may be of

the "mold" type, mobilizing a maximum of exterior forces; or it may be of

the "modulation" type, bringing into play only a minimum number of

them. Even in the case of the mold, however, there are nearly instantane-

ous, interior intermediate states between the molecular content that

assumes its own specific forms and the determinate molar expression of

the outside by the form of the mold. Conversely, even when the multiplica-

tion and temporalization of the intermediate states testify to the endo-

genous character of the molar form (as with crystals), a minimum of

exterior forces still intervene in each of the stages.

We must therefore say

that the relative independence of content and expression, the real distinc-

tion between molecular content and molar expression with their respective

forms, has a special status enjoying a certain amount of latitude between

the limit-cases.

Since strata are judgments of God, one should not hesitate to apply all

the subtleties of medieval Scholasticism and theology. There is a real dis-

tinction between content and expression because the corresponding forms

are effectively distinct in the "thing" itself, and not only in the mind of the

observer. But this real distinction is quite special; it is only formal since the

two forms compose or shape a single thing, a single stratified subject. Vari-

ous examples of formal distinction can be cited: between scales or orders of

magnitude (as between a map and its model; or, in a different fashion,

between the micro- and macrophysical levels, as in the parable of

Eddington's two offices); between the various states or formal reasons

through which a thing passes; between the thing in one form, and as

affected by a possibly exterior causality giving it a different form; and so

forth. (There is a proliferation of distinct forms because, in addition to

content and expression each having its own forms, intermediate states

introduce forms of expression proper to content and forms of content

proper to expression.)

As diverse and real as formal distinctions are, on the organic stratum the

very nature of the distinction changes. As a result, the entire distribution

between content and expression is different. The organic stratum never-

theless preserves, and even amplifies, the relation between the molecular

and the molar, with all kinds of intermediate states. We saw this in the case

of morphogenesis, where double articulation is inseparable from a com-

munication between two orders of magnitude. The same thing applies to

0,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS D 59

cellular chemistry. But the organic stratum has a unique character that

must account for the amplifications. In a preceding discussion, expression

was dependent upon the expressed molecular content in all directions and

in every dimension and had independence only to the extent that it

appealed to a higher order of magnitude and to exterior forces: The real dis-

tinction was between forms, but forms belonging to the same aggregate, the

same thing or subject. Now, however, expression becomes independent in its
own right, in other words, autonomous. Before, the coding of a stratum was

coextensive with that stratum; on the organic stratum, on the other hand, it

takes place on an autonomous and independent line that detaches as much

as possible from the second and third dimensions. Expression ceases to be

voluminous or superficial, becoming linear, unidimensional (even in its

segmentarity). The essential thing is the linearity of the nucleic sequence.

The real distinction between content and expression, therefore, is not sim-

ply formal. It is strictly speaking real, and passes into the molecular, with-

out regard to order of magnitude. It is between two classes of molecules,

nucleic acids of expression and proteins of content, nucleic elements or

nucleotides and protein elements or amino acids. Both expression and

content are now molecular and molar. The distinction no longer concerns a

single aggregate or subject; linearity takes us further in the direction of flat

multiplicities, rather than unity. Expression involves nucleotides and

nucleic acids as well as molecules that, in their substance and form, are

entirely independent not only of molecules of content but of any directed

action in the exterior milieu. Thus invariance is a characteristic of certain

molecules and is not found exclusively on the molar scale. Conversely, pro-

teins, in their substance and form of content, are equally independent of

nucleotides: the only thing univocally determined is that one amino acid

rather than another corresponds to a sequence of three nucleotides.

' What

the linear form of expression determines is therefore a derivative form of

expression, one that is relative to content and that, through a folding back

upon itself of the protein sequence of the amino acids, finally yields the

characteristic three-dimensional structures. In short, what is specific to the

organic stratum is this alignment of expression, this exhaustion or detach-
ment of a line of expression, this reduction of form and substance of expres-

sion to a unidimensional line, guaranteeing their reciprocal independence

from content without having to account for orders of magnitude.

This has many consequences. The new configuration of expression and

content conditions not only the organism's power to reproduce but also its

power to deterritorialize or accelerate deterritorialization. The alignment

of the code or linearity of the nucleic sequence in fact marks a threshold of

deterritorialization of the "sign" that gives it a new ability to be copied and

makes the organism more deterritorialized than a crystal: only something

60 □ 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

deterritorialized is capable of reproducing itself. When content and

expression are divided along the lines of the molecular and the molar, sub-

stances move from state to state, from the preceding state to the following

state, or from layer to layer, from an already constituted layer to a layer in

the process of forming, while forms install themselves at the limit between

the last layer or last state and the exterior milieu. Thus the stratum devel-

ops into epistrata and parastrata; this is accomplished through a set of
inductions from layer to layer and state to state, or at the limit. A crystal dis-

plays this process in its pure state, since its form expands in all directions,

but always as a function of the surface layer of the substance, which can be

emptied of most of its interior without interfering with the growth. It is the

crystal's subjugation to three-dimensionality, in other words its index of

territoriality, that makes the structure incapable of formally reproducing

and expressing itself; only the accessible surface can reproduce itself, since

it is the only deterritorializable part. On the contrary, the detachment of a

pure line of expression on the organic stratum makes it possible for the

organism to attain a much higher threshold of deterritorialization, gives it

a mechanism of reproduction covering all the details of its complex spatial

structure, and enables it to put all of its interior layers "topologically in

contact" with the exterior, or rather with the polarized limit (hence the spe-

cial role of the living membrane). The development of the stratum into

epistrata and parastrata occurs not through simple inductions but through
transductions that account for the amplification of the resonance between

the molecular and the molar, independently of order of magnitude; for the

functional efficacy of the interior substances, independently of distance;

and for the possibility of a proliferation and even interlacing of forms,

independently of codes (surplus values of code or phenomena of trans-

coding or aparallel evolution).

There is a third major grouping of strata, defined less by a human

essence than, once again, by a new distribution of content and expression.

Form of content becomes "alloplastic" rather than "homoplastic"; in other

words, it brings about modifications in the external world. Form of expres-

sion becomes linguistic rather than genetic; in other words, it operates with

symbols that are comprehensible, transmittable, and modifiable from out-

side. What some call the properties of human beings—technology and

language, tool and symbol, free hand and supple larynx, "gesture and

speech"—are in fact properties of this new distribution. It would be diffi-

cult to maintain that the emergence of human beings marked the absolute

origin of this distribution. Leroi-Gourhan's analyses give us an under-

standing of how contents came to be linked with the hand-tool couple and

expressions with the face-language couple.

In this context, the hand must

not be thought of simply as an organ but instead as a coding (the digital

0,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS □ 61

code), a dynamic structuration, a dynamic formation (the manual form, or

manual formal traits). The hand as a general form of content is extended in

tools, which are themselves active forms implying substances, or formed

matters; finally, products are formed matters, or substances, which in turn

serve as tools. Whereas manual formal traits constitute the unity of compo-

sition of the stratum, the forms and substances of tools and products are

organized into parastrata and epistrata that themselves function as verita-

ble strata and mark discontinuities, breakages, communications and diffu-

sions, nomadisms and sedentarities, multiple thresholds and speeds of

relative deterritorialization in human populations. For with the hand as a

formal trait or general form of content a major threshold of deterri-

torialization is reached and opens, an accelerator that in itself permits a

shifting interplay of comparative deterritorializations and

reterritorial-izations—what makes this acceleration possible is, precisely,

phenomena of "retarded development" in the organic substrata. Not only is

the hand a deterritorialized front paw; the hand thus freed is itself

deterritorialized in relation to the grasping and locomotive hand of the

monkey. The synergistic deterritorializations of other organs (for

example, the foot) must be taken into account. So must correlative

deterritorializations of the milieu: the steppe as an associated milieu more

deterritorialized than the forest, exerting a selective pressure of

deterritorialization upon the body and technology (it was on the steppe, not

in the forest, that the hand was able to appear as a free form, and fire as a

technologically formable matter). Finally, complementary

reterritorializations must be taken into account (the foot as a

compensatory reterritorialization for the hand, also occurring on the

steppe). Maps should be made of these things, organic, ecological, and

technological maps one can lay out on the plane of consistency.

On the other hand, language becomes the new form of expression, or

rather the set of formal traits defining the new expression in operation

throughout the stratum. Just as manual traits exist only in forms and

formed matters that shatter their continuity and determine the distribution

of their effects, formal traits of expression exist only in a diversity of

formal languages and imply one or several formable substances. The sub-

stance involved is fundamentally vocal substance, which brings into play

various organic elements: not only the larynx, but the mouth and lips, and

the overall motricity of the face. Once again, a whole intensive map must

be accounted for: the mouth as a deterritorialization of the snout (the

whole "conflict between the mouth and the brain," as Perrier called it); the

lips as a deterritorialization of the mouth (only humans have lips, in other

words, an outward curling of the interior mucous membranes; only human

females have breasts, in other words, deterritorialized mammary glands:

2 □ 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

the extended nursing period advantageous for language learning is accom-

panied by a complementary reterritorialization of the lips on the breasts,

and the breasts on the lips). What a curious deterritorialization, filling

one's mouth with words instead of food and noises. The steppe, once more,

seems to have exerted strong pressures of selection: the "supple larynx" is a

development corresponding to the free hand and could have arisen only in

a deforested milieu where it is no longer necessary to have gigantic laryn-

geal sacks in order for one's cries to be heard above the constant din of the

forest. To articulate, to speak, is to speak softly. Everyone knows that lum-

berjacks rarely talk.

Physiological, acoustic, and vocal substance are not

the only things that undergo all these deterritorializations. The form of

expression, as language, also crosses a threshold.

Vocal signs have temporal linearity, and it is this superlinearity that con-

stitutes their specific deterritorialization and differentiates them from

genetic linearity. Genetic linearity is above all spatial, even though its seg-

ments are constructed and reproduced in succession; thus at this level it

does not require effective overcoding of any kind, only phenomena of

end-to-end connection, local regulations, and partial interactions

(overcoding takes place only at the level of integrations implying

different orders of magnitude). That is why Jacob is reluctant to compare

the genetic code to a language; in fact, the genetic code has neither

emitter, receiver, comprehension, nor translation, only redundancies and

surplus values.

The temporal linearity of language expression relates not

only to a succession but to a formal synthesis of succession in which time

constitutes a process of linear overcoding and engenders a phenomenon

unknown on the other strata: translation, translatability, as opposed to the

previous inductions and transductions. Translation should not be

understood simply as the ability of one language to "represent" in some

way the givens of another language, but beyond that as the ability of

language, with its own givens on its own stratum, to represent all the

other strata and thus achieve a scientific conception of the world. The

scientific world {Welt, as opposed to the Umwelt of the animal) is the

translation of all of the flows, particles, codes, and territorialities of the

other strata into a sufficiently deterritorialized system of signs, in other

words, into an overcoding specific to language. This property of
overcoding or superlinearity explains why, in language, not only is

expression independent of content, but form of expression is independent

of substance: translation is possible because the same form can pass from

one substance to another, which is not the case for the genetic code, for

example, between RNA and DNA chains. We will see later on how this situ-

ation gives rise to certain imperialist pretentions on behalf of language,

which are naively expressed in such formulas as: "Every semiology of a

nonlinguistic system must use the medium of language... .Language is the

0,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS D 63

interpreter of all the other systems, linguistic and nonlinguistic." This

amounts to defining an abstract character of language and then saying that

the other strata can share in that character only by being spoken in lan-

guage. That is stating the obvious. More positively, it must be noted that

the immanence within language of universal translation means that its

epistrata and parastrata, with respect to superpositions, diffusions, com-

munications, and abutments, operate in an entirely different manner than

those of other strata: all human movements, even the most violent, imply

translations.

We have to hurry, Challenger said, we're being rushed by the line of time

on this third stratum. So we have a new organization of content and

expression, each with its own forms and substances: technological content,

semiotic or symbolic expression. Content should be understood not sim-

ply as the hand and tools but as a technical social machine that preexists

them and constitutes states of force or formations of power. Expression

should be understood not simply as the face and language, or individual

languages, but as a semiotic collective machine that preexists them and

constitutes regimes of signs. A formation of power is much more than a

tool; a regime of signs is much more than a language. Rather, they act as

determining and selective agents, as much in the constitution of languages

and tools as in their usages and mutual or respective diffusions and com-

munications. The third stratum sees the emergence of Machines that are

fully a part of that stratum but at the same time rear up and stretch their

pincers out in all directions at all the other strata. Is this not like an interme-
diate state between the two states of the abstract Machine?—the state in

which it remains enveloped in a corresponding stratum (ecumenon), and

the state in which it develops in its own right on the destratified plane of

consistency (planomenon). The abstract machine begins to unfold, to

stand to full height, producing an illusion exceeding all strata, even though

the machine itself still belongs to a determinate stratum. This is, obviously,

the illusion constitutive of man (who does man think he is?). This illusion

derives from the overcoding immanent to language itself. But what is not

illusory are the new distributions between content and expression: techno-

logical content characterized by the hand-tool relation and, at a deeper

level, tied to a social Machine and formations of power; symbolic expres-

sion characterized by face-language relations and, at a deeper level, tied to

a semiotic Machine and regimes of signs. On both sides, the epistrata and

parastrata, the superposed degrees and abutting forms, attain more than

ever before the status of autonomous strata in their own right. In cases

where we can discern two different regimes of signs or two different forma-

tions of power, we shall say that they are in fact two different strata in

human populations.

64 □ 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

What precisely is the relation now between content and expression, and

what type of distinction is there between them? It's all in the head. Yet

never was a distinction more real. What we are trying to say is that there is

indeed one exterior milieu for the entire stratum, permeating the entire

stratum: the cerebral-nervous milieu. It comes from the organic substra-

tum, but of course that substratum does not merely play the role of a sub-

stratum or passive support. It is no less complex in organization. Rather, it

constitutes the prehuman soup immersing us. Our hands and faces are

immersed in it. The brain is a population, a set of tribes tending toward two

poles. In Leroi-Gourhan's analyses of the constitution of these two poles in

the soup—one of which depends on the actions of the face, the other on the

hand—their correlation or relativity does not preclude a real distinction

between them; quite the contrary, it entails one, as the reciprocal presuppo-

sition of two articulations, the manual articulation of content and the

facial articulation of expression. And the distinction is not simply real, as

between molecules, things, or subjects; it has become essential (as they

used to say in the Middle Ages), as between attributes, genres of being, or

irreducible categories: things and words. Yet we find that the most general

of movements, the one by which each of the distinct articulations is already

double in its own right, carries over onto this level; certain formal elements

of content play the role of expression in relation to content proper, and cer-

tain formal elements of expression play the role of content in relation to

expression proper. In the first case, Leroi-Gourhan shows how the hand

creates a whole world of symbols, a whole pluridimensional language, not

to be confused with unilinear verbal language, which constitutes a radiat-

ing expression specific to content (he sees this as the origin of writing).

The second case is clearly displayed in the double articulation specific to

language itself, since phonemes form a radiating content specific to the

expression of monemes as linear significant segments (it is only under

these conditions that double articulation as a general characteristic of

strata has the linguistic meaning Martinet attributes to it). Our discussion

of the relations between content and expression, the real distinction

between them, and the variations of those relations and that distinction on

the major types of strata, is now provisionally complete.

Challenger wanted to go faster and faster. No one was left, but he went on

anyway. The change in his voice, and in his appearance, was growing more

and more pronounced. Something animalistic in him had begun to speak

when he started talking about human beings. You still couldn't put your

finger on it, but Challenger seemed to be deterritorializing on the spot. He

still had three problems he wanted to discuss. The first seemed primarily

terminological: Under what circumstances may we speak of signs? Should

we say they are everywhere on all the strata and that there is a sign when-

0,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS D 65

ever there is a form of expression? We may summarily distinguish three

kinds of signs: indexes (territorial signs), symbols (deterritorialized signs),
and icons (signs of reterritorialization). Should we say that there are signs

on all the strata, under the pretext that every stratum includes territoriali-

ties and movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization? This

kind of expansive method is very dangerous, because it lays the ground-

work for or reinforces the imperialism of language, if only by relying on its

function as universal translator or interpreter. It is obvious that there is no

system of signs common to all strata, not even in the form of a semiotic

"chora" theoretically prior to symbolization.

It would appear that we

may accurately speak of signs only when there is a distinction between

forms of expression and forms of content that is not only real but also cate-

gorical. Under these conditions, there is a semiotic system on the corre-

sponding stratum because the abstract machine has precisely that fully

erect posture that permits it to "write," in other words, to treat language

and extract a regime of signs from it. But before it reaches that point, in

so-called natural codings, the abstract machine remains enveloped in the

strata: It does not write in any way and has no margin of latitude allowing it

to recognize something as a sign (except in the strictly territorial sense of

animal signs). After that point, the abstract machine develops on the plane

of consistency and no longer has any way of making a categorical distinc-

tion between signs and particles; for example, it writes, but flush with the

real, it inscribes directly upon the plane of consistency. It therefore seems

reasonable to reserve the word "sign" in the strict sense for the last group of

strata. This terminological discussion would be entirely without interest if

it did not bring us to yet another danger: not the imperialism of language

affecting all of the strata, but the imperialism of the signifier affecting lan-

guage itself, affecting all regimes of signs and the entire expanse of the

strata upon which they are located. The question here is not whether there

are signs on every stratum but whether all signs are signifiers, whether all

signs are endowed with signifiance, whether the semiotic of signs is neces-

sarily linked to a semiology of the signifier. Those who take this route may

even be led to forgo the notion of the sign, for the primacy of the signifier

over language guarantees the primacy of language over all of the strata even

more effectively than the simple expansion of the sign in all directions.

What we are saying is that the illusion specific to this posture of the abstract

Machine, the illusion that one can grasp and shuffle all the strata between

one's pincers, can be better secured through the erection of the signifier

than through the extension of the sign (thanks to signifiance, language can

claim to be in direct contact with the strata without having to go through

the supposed signs on each one). But we're still going in the same circle,

we're still spreading the same canker.

6 □ 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

The linguistic relation between the signifier and signified has, of course,

been conceived in many different ways. It has been said that they are

arbitrary; that they are as necessary to each other as the two sides of the

same leaf; that they correspond term by term, or else globally; and that they

are so ambivalent as to be indistinguishable. In any event, the signified is

thought not to exist outside of its relationship with signifier, and the ulti-

mate signified is the very existence of the signifier, extrapolated beyond the

sign. There is only one thing that can be said about the signifier: it is Redun-

dancy, it is the Redundant. Hence its incredible despotism, and its success.

Theories of arbitrariness, necessity, term-by-term or global correspon-

dence, and ambivalence serve the same cause: the reduction of expression

to the signifier. Yet forms of content and forms of expression are highly

relative, always in a state of reciprocal presupposition. The relations

between their respective segments are biunivocal, exterior, and "de-

formed." There is never conformity between the two, or from one to the

other. There is always real independence and a real distinction; even to fit

the forms together, and to determine the relations between them, requires a

specific, variable assemblage. None of these characteristics applies to the

signifier-signified relation, even though some seem to coincide with it par-

tially and accidentally. Overall, these characteristics stand in radical oppo-

sition to the scenario of the signifier. A form of content is not a signified,

any more than a form of expression is a signifier.

This is true for all the

strata, including those on which language plays a role.

Signifier enthusiasts take an oversimplified situation as their implicit

model: word and thing. From the word they extract the signifier, and from

the thing a signified in conformity with the word, and therefore subjugated

to the signifier. They operate in a sphere interior to and homogeneous with

language. Let us follow Foucault in his exemplary analysis, which, though

it seems not to be, is eminently concerned with linguistics. Take a thing like

the prison: the prison is a form, the "prison-form"; it is a form of content on

a stratum and is related to other forms of content (school, barracks, hospi-

tal, factory). This thing or form does not refer back to the word "prison"

but to entirely different words and concepts, such as "delinquent" and

"delinquency," which express a new way of classifying, stating, translating,

and even committing criminal acts. "Delinquency" is the form of expres-

sion in reciprocal presupposition with the form of content "prison." Delin-

quency is in no way a signifier, even a juridical signifier, the signified of

which would be the prison. That would flatten the entire analysis. More-

over, the form of expression is reducible not to words but to a set of state-

ments arising in the social field considered as a stratum (that is what a

regime of signs is). The form of content is reducible not to a thing but to a

complex state of things as a formation of power (architecture, regimenta-

0,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS □ 67

tion, etc.). We could say that there are two constantly intersecting multipli-

cities, "discursive multiplicities" of expression and "nondiscursive multi-

plicities" of content. It is even more complex than that because the prison

as a form of content has a relative expression all its own; there are all kinds

of statements specific to it that do not necessarily coincide with the state-

ments of delinquency. Conversely, delinquency as a form of expression has

an autonomous content all its own, since delinquency expresses not only a

new way of evaluating crimes but a new way of committing them. Form of

content and form of expression, prison and delinquency: each has its own

history, microhistory, segments. At most, along with other contents and

expressions, they imply a shared state of the abstract Machine acting not at

all as a signifier but as a kind of diagram (a single abstract machine for the

prison and the school and the barracks and the hospital and the factory

...). Fitting the two types of forms together, segments of content and

segments of expression, requires a whole double-pincered, or rather

double-headed, concrete assemblage taking their real distinction into

account. It requires a whole organization articulating formations of power

and regimes of signs, and operating on the molecular level (societies char-

acterized by what Foucault calls disciplinary power).

In short, we should

never oppose words to things that supposedly correspond to them, nor

signifiers to signifieds that are supposedly in conformity with them. What

should be opposed are distinct formalizations, in a state of unstable equi-

librium or reciprocal presupposition. "// is in vain that we say what we see;
what we see never resides in what wesay."

As in school: there is not just one

writing lesson, that of the great redundant Signifier for any and all

signifieds. There are two distinct formalizations in reciprocal presupposi-

tion and constituting a double-pincer: the formalization of expression in

the reading and writing lesson (with its own relative contents), and the

formalization of content in the lesson of things (with their own relative

expressions). We are never signifier or signified. We are stratified.

The preferred method would be severely restrictive, as opposed to the

expansive method that places signs on all strata or signifier in all signs

(although at the limit it may forgo signs entirely). First, there exist forms of

expression without signs (for example, the genetic code has nothing to do

with a language). It is only under certain conditions that strata can be said

to include signs; signs cannot be equated with language in general but are

defined by regimes of statements that are so many real usages or functions

of language. Then why retain the word sign for these regimes, which forma-

lize an expression without designating or signifying the simultaneous con-

tents, which are formalized in a different way? Signs are not signs of a thing;

they are signs of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, they mark a

certain threshold crossed in the course of these movements, and it is for

8 □ 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

this reason that the word should be retained (as we have seen, this applies

even to animal "signs").

Next, if we consider regimes of signs using this restrictive definition, we

see that they are not, or not necessarily, signifiers. Just as signs designate

only a certain formalization of expression in a determinate group of strata,

signifiance itself designates only one specific regime among a number of

regimes existing in that particular formalization. Just as there are

ase-miotic expressions, or expressions without signs, there are

asemiological regimes of signs, asignifying signs, both on the strata and

on the plane of consistency. The most that can be said of signifiance is that

it characterizes one regime, which is not even the most interesting or

modern or contemporary one, but is perhaps only more pernicious,

cancerous, and despotic than the others, and more steeped in illusion than

they.

In any case, content and expression are never reducible to

signified-signifier. And (this is the second problem) neither are they

reducible to base-superstructure. One can no more posit a primacy of

content as the determining factor than a primacy of expression as a

signifying system. Expression can never be made into a form reflecting

content, even if one endows it with a "certain" amount of independence

and a certain potential for reacting, if only because so-called economic

content already has a form and even forms of expression that are specific

to it. Form of content and form of expression involve two parallel

formalizations in presupposition: it is obvious that their segments

constantly intertwine, embed themselves in one another; but this is

accomplished by the abstract machine from which the two forms derive,

and by machinic assemblages that regulate their relations. If this

parallelism is replaced by a pyramidal image, then content (including its

form) becomes an economic base of production displaying all of the

characteristics of the Abstract; the assemblages become the first story of a

superstructure that, as such, is necessarily situated within a State

apparatus; the regimes of signs and forms of expression become the

second story of the superstructure, defined by ideology. It isn't altogether

clear where language should go, since the great Despot decided that it

should be reserved a special place, as the common good of the nation and

the vehicle for information. Thus one misconstrues the nature of language,

which exists only in heterogeneous regimes of signs, and rather than

circulating information distributes contradictory orders. It misconstrues

the nature of regimes of signs, which express organizations of power or

assemblages and have nothing to do with ideology as the supposed expres-

sion of a content (ideology is a most execrable concept obscuring all of the

effectively operating social machines). It misconstrues the nature of orga-

nizations of power, which are in no way located within a State apparatus

but rather are everywhere, effecting formalizations of content and expres-

0,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS □ 69

sion, the segments of which they intertwine. Finally, it misconstrues the
nature of content, which is in no way economic "in the last instance," since
there are as many directly economic signs or expressions as there are
noneconomic contents. Nor can the status of social formations be analyzed
by throwing some signifier into the base, or vice versa, or a bit of phallus or
castration into political economy, or a bit of economics or politics into
psychoanalysis.

There is a third problem. It is difficult to elucidate the system of the

strata without seeming to introduce a kind of cosmic or even spiritual evo-
lution from one to the other, as if they were arranged in stages and ascended
degrees of perfection. Nothing of the sort. The different figures of content
and expression are not stages. There is no biosphere or noosphere, but
everywhere the same Mechanosphere. If one begins by considering the
strata in themselves, it cannot be said that one is less organized than
another. This even applies to a stratum serving as a substratum: there is no
fixed order, and one stratum can serve directly as a substratum for another
without the intermediaries one would expect there to be from the stand-
point of stages and degrees (for example, microphysical sectors can serve as
an immediate substratum for organic phenomena). Or the apparent order
can be reversed, with cultural or technical phenomena providing a fertile
soil, a good soup, for the development of insects, bacteria, germs, or even
particles. The industrial age defined as the age of insects ... It's even worse
nowadays: you can't even tell in advance which stratum is going to commu-
nicate with which other, or in what direction. Above all, there is no lesser,
no higher or lower, organization; the substratum is an integral part of the
stratum, is bound up with it as the milieu in which change occurs, and not
an increase in organization.

Furthermore, if we consider the plane of con-

sistency we note that the most disparate of things and signs move upon it: a
semiotic fragment rubs shoulders with a chemical interaction, an electron
crashes into a language, a black hole captures a genetic message, a crystalli-
zation produces a passion, the wasp and the orchid cross a letter... There
is no "like" here, we are not saying "like an electron," "like an interaction,"
etc. The plane of consistency is the abolition of all metaphor; all that con-
sists is Real. These are electrons in person, veritable black holes, actual
organites, authentic sign sequences. It's just that they have been uprooted
from their strata, destratified, decoded, deterritorialized, and that is what
makes their proximity and interpenetration in the plane of consistency
possible. A silent dance. The plane of consistency knows nothing of differ-
ences in level, orders of magnitude, or distances. It knows nothing of the dif-
ference between the artificial and the natural. It knows nothing of the
distinction between contents and expressions, or that between forms and

0 □ 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

formed substances; these things exist only by means of and in relation to the

strata.

But how can one still identify and name things if they have lost the strata

that qualified them, if they have gone into absolute deterritorialization?

Eyes are black holes, but what are black holes and eyes outside their strata

and territorialities? What it comes down to is that we cannot content our-

selves with a dualism or summary opposition between the strata and the

destratified plane of consistency. The strata themselves are animated and

defined by relative speeds of deterritorialization; moreover, absolute

deterritorialization is there from the beginning, and the strata are spin-

offs, thickenings on a plane of consistency that is everywhere, always pri-

mary and always immanent. In addition, the plane of consistency is

occupied, drawn by the abstract Machine; the abstract Machine exists
simultaneously developed on the destratified plane it draws, and envel-

oped in each stratum whose unity of composition it defines, and even

half-erected in certain strata whose form of prehension it defines. That

which races or dances upon the plane of consistency thus carries with it the

aura of its stratum, an undulation, a memory or tension. The plane of

consistency retains just enough of the strata to extract from them variables

that operate in the plane of consistency as its own functions. The plane of

consistency, or planomenon, is in no way an undifferentiated aggregate

of unformed matters, but neither is it a chaos of formed matters of every

kind. It is true that on the plane of consistency there are no longer forms

or substances, content or expression, respective and relative

deterritorializations. But beneath the forms and substances of the strata

the plane of consistency (or the abstract machine) constructs continuums
of intensity: it creates continuity for intensities that it extracts from

distinct forms and substances. Beneath contents and expressions the plane

of consistency (or the abstract machine) emits and combines
particles-signs that set the most asignifying of signs to functioning in the

most deterritorialized of particles. Beneath relative movements the plane

of consistency (or the abstract machine) performs conjunctions of flows of
deterritorialization that transform the respective indexes into absolute

values. The only intensities known to the strata are discontinuous, bound

up in forms and substances; the only particles are divided into particles of

content and articles of expression; the only deterritorialized flows are

disjointed and reterritorialized. Continuum of intensities, combined

emission of particles or signs-particles, conjunction of deterritorialized

flows: these are the three factors proper to the plane of consistency; they

are brought about by the abstract machine and are constitutive of

destratification. Now there is no hint in all of this of a chaotic white

night or an undifferentiated black night. There are rules, rules of

"plan(n)ing," of diagramming, as we will see later on, or elsewhere. The

0,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS □ 71

abstract machine is not random; the continuities, emissions and combina-

tions, and conjunctions do not occur in just any fashion.

A final distinction must now be noted. Not only does the abstract

machine have different simultaneous states accounting for the complex-

ity of what takes place on the plane of consistency, but the abstract

machine should not be confused with what we call a concrete machinic

assemblage. The abstract machine sometimes develops upon the plane of

consistency, whose continuums, emissions, and conjugations it con-

structs, and sometimes remains enveloped in a stratum whose unity of

composition and force of attraction or prehension it defines. The
machinic assemblage is something entirely different from the abstract

machine, even though it is very closely connected with it. First, on a stra-

tum, it performs the coadaptations of content and expression, ensures

biunivocal relationships between segments of content and segments of

expression, and guides the division of the stratum into epistrata and

parastrata. Next, between strata, it ensures the relation to whatever serves

as a substratum and brings about the corresponding changes in

organization. Finally, it is in touch with the plane of consistency because

it necessarily effectuates the abstract machine on a particular stratum,

between strata, and in the relation between the strata and the plane. An

assemblage (for example, the smith's anvil among the Dogons) is neces-

sary for the articulations of the organic stratum to come about. An assem-

blage is necessary for the relation between two strata to come about. And

an assemblage is necessary for organisms to be caught within and perme-

ated by a social field that utilizes them: Must not the Amazons amputate a

breast to adapt the organic stratum to a warlike technological stratum, as

though at the behest of a fearsome woman-bow-steppe assemblage?

Assemblages are necessary for states offeree and regimes of signs to inter-

twine their relations. Assemblages are necessary in order for the unity of

composition enveloped in a stratum, the relations between a given stra-

tum and the others, and the relation between these strata and the plane of

consistency to be organized rather than random. In every respect,

machinic assemblages effectuate the abstract machine insofar as it is

developed on the plane of consistency or enveloped in a stratum. The

most important problem of all: given a certain machinic assemblage,

what is its relation of effectuation with the abstract machine? How does it

effectuate it, with what adequation? Classify assemblages. What we call

the mechanosphere is the set of all abstract machines and machinic

assemblages outside the strata, on the strata, or between strata.

The system of the strata thus has nothing to do with signifier and signi-

fied, base and superstructure, mind and matter. All of these are ways of

reducing the strata to a single stratum, or of closing the system in on itself

2 □ 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

by cutting it off from the plane of consistency as destratification. We had to

summarize before we lost our voice. Challenger was finishing up. His voice

had become unbearably shrill. He was suffocating. His hands were becom-

ing elongated pincers that had become incapable of grasping anything but

could still vaguely point to things. Some kind of matter seemed to be pour-

ing out from the double mask, the two heads; it was impossible to tell

whether it was getting thicker or more watery. Some of the audience had

returned, but only shadows and prowlers. "You hear that? It's an animal's

voice." So the summary would have to be quick, the terminology would

have to be set down as well as possible, for no good reason. There was a first

group of notions: the Body without Organs or the destratified Plane of

Consistency; the Matter of the Plane, that which occurs on the body or

plane (singular, nonsegmented multiplicities composed of intensive con-

tinuums, emissions of particles-signs, conjunctions of flows); and the

abstract Machine, or abstract Machines, insofar as they construct that

body or draw that plane or "diagram" what occurs (lines of flight, or abso-

lute deterritorializations).

Then there was the system of the strata. On the intensive continuum, the

strata fashion forms and form matters into substances. In combined emis-

sions, they make the distinction between expressions and contents, units of

expression and units of content, for example, signs and particles. In con-

junctions, they separate flows, assigning them relative movements and

diverse territorialities, relative deterritorializations and complementary

reterritorializations. Thus the strata set up everywhere double articula-

tions animated by movements: forms and substances of content and forms

and substances of expression constituting segmentary multiplicities with

relations that are determinable in every case. Such are the strata. Each stra-

tum is a double articulation of content and expression, both of which are

really distinct and in a state of reciprocal presupposition. Content and

expression intermingle, and it is two-headed machinic assemblages that

place their segments in relation. What varies from stratum to stratum is the

nature of the real distinction between content and expression, the nature of

the substances as formed matters, and the nature of the relative move-

ments. We may make a summary distinction between three major types of

real distinction: the real-formal distinction between orders of magnitude,

with the establishment of a resonance of expression (induction); the

real-real distinction between different subjects, with the establishment of

a linearity of expression (transduction); and the real-essential distinction

between different attributes or categories, with the establishment of a

superlinearity of expression (translation).

Each stratum serves as the substratum for another stratum. Each stra-

tum has a unity of composition defined by its milieu, substantial elements,

0,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS □ 73

and formal traits (Ecumenon). But it divides into parastrata according to

its irreducible forms and associated milieus, and into epistrata according

to its layers of formed substances and intermediary milieus. Epistrata and

parastrata must themselves be thought of as strata. A machinic assemblage

is an interstratum insofar as it regulates the relations between strata, as well

as the relations between contents and expressions on each stratum, in

conformity with the preceding divisions. A single assemblage can borrow

from different strata, and with a certain amount of apparent disorder;

conversely, a stratum or element of a stratum can join others in function-

ing in a different assemblage. Finally, the machinic assemblage is a
metastratum because it is also in touch with the plane of consistency and

necessarily effectuates the abstract machine. The abstract machine exists

enveloped in each stratum, whose Ecumenon or unity of composition it

defines, and developed on the plane of consistency, whose destratification

it performs (the Planomenon). Thus when the assemblages fit together the

variables of a stratum as a function of its unity, they also bring about a spe-

cific effectuation of the abstract machine as it exists outside the strata.

Machinic assemblages are simultaneously located at the intersection of the

contents and expression on each stratum, and at the intersection of all of

the strata with the plane of consistency. They rotate in all directions, like

beacons.

It was over. Only later on would all of this take on concrete meaning. The

double-articulated mask had come undone, and so had the gloves and the

tunic, from which liquids escaped. As they streamed away they seemed to

eat at the strata of the lecture hall, which was filled with fumes of olibanum

and "hung with strangely figured arras." Disarticulated, deterritorialized,

Challenger muttered that he was taking the earth with him, that he was

leaving for the mysterious world, his poison garden. He whispered some-

thing else: it is by headlong flight that things progress and signs proliferate.

Panic is creation. A young woman cried out, her face "convulsed with a

wilder, deeper, and more hideous epilepsy of stark panic than they had seen

on human countenance before." No one had heard the summary, and no

one tried to keep Challenger from leaving. Challenger, or what remained of

him, slowly hurried toward the plane of consistency, following a bizarre tra-

jectory with nothing relative left about it. He tried to slip into an assem-

blage serving as a drum-gate, the particle Clock with its intensive clicking

and conjugated rhythms hammering out the absolute: "The figure slumped

oddly into a posture scarcely human, and began a curious, fascinated sort

of shuffle toward the coffin-shaped clock ___ The figure had now reached

the abnormal clock, and the watchers saw through the dense fumes a

blurred black claw fumbling with the tall, hieroglyphed door. The fumbling

made a queer, clicking sound. Then the figure entered the coffin-shaped

6 □ NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

grammar (masculine-feminine, singular-plural, noun-verb, subject of the

statement-subject of enunciation, etc.). The elementary unit of language—

the statement—is the order-word.

Rather than common sense, a faculty

for the centralization of information, we must define an abominable

faculty consisting in emitting, receiving, and transmitting order-words.

Language is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedi-

ence. "The baroness has not the slightest intention of convincing me of her

sincerity; she is simply indicating that she prefers to see me pretend to

agree."

We see this in police or government announcements, which often

have little plausibility or truthfulness, but say very clearly what should be

observed and retained. The indifference to any kind of credibility exhib-

ited by these announcements often verges on provocation. This is proof

that the issue lies elsewhere. Let people say...: that is all language

demands. Spengler notes that the fundamental forms of speech are not the

statement of a judgment or the expression of a feeling, but "the command,

the expression of obedience, the assertion, the question, the affirmation or

negation," very short phrases that command life and are inseparable from

enterprises and large-scale projects: "Ready?" "Yes." "Go ahead."

Words

are not tools, but we give children language, pens, and notebooks as we give

workers shovels and pickaxes. A rule of grammar is a power marker before

it is a syntactical marker. The order does not refer to prior significations or

to a prior organization of distinctive units. Quite the opposite. Informa-

tion is only the strict minimum necessary for the emission, transmission,

and observation of orders as commands. One must be just informed

enough not to confuse "Fire!" with "Fore!" or to avoid the unfortunate situ-

ation of the teacher and the student as described by Lewis Carroll (the

teacher, at the top of the stairs, asks a question that is passed on by servants,

who distort it at each step of the way, and the student, below in the court-

yard, returns an answer that is also distorted at each stage of the trip back).

Language is not life; it gives life orders. Life does not speak; it listens and

waits.

Every order-word, even a father's to his son, carries a little death

sentence—a Judgment, as Kafka put it.

The hard part is to specify the status and scope of the order-word. It is

not a question of the origin of language, since the order-word is only a

language-function, a function coextensive with language. If language

always seems to presuppose itself, if we cannot assign it a nonlinguistic

point of departure, it is because language does not operate between some-

thing seen (or felt) and something said, but always goes from saying to say-

ing. We believe that narrative consists not in communicating what one has

seen but in transmitting what one has heard, what someone else said to

you. Hearsay. It does not even suffice to invoke a vision distorted by pas-

sion. The "first" language, or rather the first determination of language, is

NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS □ 77

not the trope or metaphor but indirect discourse. The importance some

have accorded metaphor and metonymy proves disastrous for the study of

language. Metaphors and metonymies are merely effects; they are a part of

language only when they presuppose indirect discourse. There are many

passions in a passion, all manner of voices in a voice, murmurings, speak-

ing in tongues: that is why all discourse is indirect, and the translative

movement proper to language is that of indirect discourse.

Benveniste

denies that the bee has language, even though it has an organic coding pro-

cess and even uses tropes. It has no language because it can communicate

what it has seen but not transmit what has been communicated to it. A bee

that has seen a food source can communicate the message to bees that did

not see it, but a bee that has not seen it cannot transmit the message to oth-

ers that did not see it.

Language is not content to go from a first party to a

second party, from one who has seen to one who has not, but necessarily

goes from a second party to a third party, neither of whom has seen. It is in

this sense that language is the transmission of the word as order-word, not

the communication of a sign as information. Language is a map, not a trac-

ing. But how can the order-word be a function coextensive with language

when the order, the command, seems tied to a restricted type of explicit

proposition marked by the imperative?

Austin's famous theses clearly demonstrate that the various extrinsic

relations between action and speech by which a statement can describe an

action in an indicative mode or incite it in an imperative mode, etc., are not

all there is. There are also intrinsic relations between speech and certain

actions that are accomplished by sayingthem (the performative: I swear by

saying "I swear"), and more generally between speech and certain actions

that are accomplished in speaking (the illocutionary: I ask a question by

saying "Is ... ?" I make a promise by saying "I love you ..."; I give a com-

mand by using the imperative, etc.). These acts internal to speech, these

immanent relations between statements and acts, have been termed
implicit or nondiscursive presuppositions, as opposed to the potentially

explicit assumptions by which a statement refers to other statements or an

external action (Ducrot). The theory of the performative sphere, and the

broader sphere of the illocutionary, has had three important and immedi-

ate consequences: (1) It has made it impossible to conceive of language as a

code, since a code is the condition of possibility for all explanation. It has

also made it impossible to conceive of speech as the communication of

information: to order, question, promise, or affirm is not to inform some-

one about a command, doubt, engagement, or assertion but to effectuate

these specific, immanent, and necessarily implicit acts. (2) It has made it

impossible to define semantics, syntactics, or even phonematics as scien-

tific zones of language independent of pragmatics. Pragmatics ceases to be

8 □ NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

a "trash heap," pragmatic determinations cease to be subject to the alterna-
tive: fall outside language, or answer to explicit conditions that syntacticize
and semanticize pragmatic determinations. Instead, pragmatics becomes
the presupposition behind all of the other dimensions and insinuates itself
into everything. (3) It makes it impossible to maintain the distinction
between language and speech because speech can no longer be defined sim-
ply as the extrinsic and individual use of a primary signification, or the var-
iable application of a preexisting syntax. Quite the opposite, the meaning
and syntax of language can no longer be defined independently of the
speech acts they presuppose.

It is true that it is still difficult to see how speech acts or implicit presup-

positions can be considered a function coextensive with language. It is all
the more difficult if one starts with the performative (that which one does
by saying it) and moves by extension to the illocutionary (that which one
does in speaking). For it is always possible to thwart that move. The
performative can be walled in by explaining it by specific syntactic and
semantic characteristics avoiding any recourse to a generalized prag-
matics. According to Benveniste, for example, the performative relates not
to acts but instead to a property ofself-referentiality of terms (the true per-
sonal pronouns, I, YOU..., defined as shifters). By this account, a
preexistent structure of subjectivity, or intersubjectivity, in language,
rather than presupposing speech acts, is adequate to account for them.

Benveniste thus defines language as communicational rather than infor-
mational; this properly linguistic intersubjectivity, or subjectification,
explains all the rest, in other words, everything that is brought into being by
saying it. The question is whether subjective communication is any better a
linguistic notion than ideal information. Oswald Ducrot has set forth the
reasons that have led him to reverse Benveniste's schema: The phenome-
non of self-referentiality cannot account for the performative. The oppo-
site is the case; it is "the fact that certain statements are socially devoted to
the accomplishment of certain actions" that explains self-referentiality.
The performative itself is explained by the illocutionary, not the opposite.
It is the illocutionary that constitutes the nondiscursive or implicit presup-
positions. And the illocutionary is in turn explained by collective assem-
blages of enunciation, by juridical acts or equivalents of juridical acts,
which, far from depending on subjectification proceedings or assignations
of subjects in language, in fact determine their distribution. Communica-
tion is no better a concept than information; intersubjectivity gets us no
further than signifiance in accounting for these "statements-acts" assem-
blages that in each language delimit the role and range of subjective mor-
phemes.

(We will see that the analysis of indirect discourse confirms this

OVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS □ 79

point of view since it shows that subjectifications are not primary but

result from a complex assemblage.)

We call order-words, not a particular category of explicit statements (for

example, in the imperative), but the relation of every word or every state-

ment to implicit presuppositions, in other words, to speech acts that are,

and can only be, accomplished in the statement. Order-words do not con-

cern commands only, but every act that is linked to statements by a "social

obligation." Every statement displays this link, directly or indirectly. Ques-

tions, promises, are order-words. The only possible definition of language

is the set of all order-words, implicit presuppositions, or speech acts cur-

rent in a language at a given moment.

The relation between the statement and the act is internal, immanent,

but it is not one of identity. Rather, it is a relation of redundancy. The

order-word itself is the redundancy of the act and the statement.

Newspapers, news, proceed by redundancy, in that they tell us what we

"must" think, retain, expect, etc. Language is neither informational nor

communica-tional. It is not the communication of information but

something quite different: the transmission of order-words, either from

one statement to another or within each statement, insofar as each

statement accomplishes an act and the act is accomplished in the

statement. The most general schema of information science posits in

principle an ideal state of maximum information and makes redundancy

merely a limitative condition serving to decrease this theoretical

maximum in order to prevent it from being drowned out by noise. We

are saying that the redundancy of the order-word is instead primary and

that information is only the minimal condition for the transmission of

order-words (which is why the opposition to be made is not between noise

and information but between all the indisciplines at work in language,

and the order-word as discipline or "grammaticality"). Redundancy has

two forms, frequency and resonance; the first concerns the signifiance of

information, the second (I = I) concerns the subjectivity of

communication. It becomes apparent that information and

communication, and even signifiance and subjectification, are subordinate

to redundancy. A distinction is sometimes made between information

and communication; some authors envision an abstract signifiance of

information and an abstract subjectification of communication. None of

this, however, yields an implicit or primary form of language. There is no

signifiance independent of dominant significations, nor is there

subjectification independent of an established order of subjection. Both

depend on the nature and transmission of order-words in a given social

field.

There is no individual enunciation. There is not even a subject of enun-

ciation. Yet relatively few linguists have analyzed the necessarily social

80 □

NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

character of enunciation.' ° The problem is that it is not enough to establish

that enunciation has this social character, since it could be extrinsic; there-

fore too much or too little is said about it. The social character of enuncia-

tion is intrinsically founded only if one succeeds in demonstrating how

enunciation in itself implies collective assemblages. It then becomes clear

that the statement is individuated, and enunciation subjectified, only to

the extent that an impersonal collective assemblage requires it and deter-

mines it to be so. It is for this reason that indirect discourse, especially
"free" indirect discourse, is of exemplary value: there are no clear, distinc-

tive contours; what comes first is not an insertion of variously individ-

uated statements, or an interlocking of different subjects of enunciation,

but a collective assemblage resulting in the determination of relative

subjectification proceedings, or assignations of individuality and their

shifting distributions within discourse. Indirect discourse is not explained

by the distinction between subjects; rather, it is the assemblage, as it freely

appears in this discourse, that explains all the voices present within a single

voice, the glimmer of girls in a monologue by Charlus, the languages in a

language, the order-words in a word. The American murderer "Son of

Sam" killed on the prompting of an ancestral voice, itself transmitted

through the voice of a dog. The notion of collective assemblage of enuncia-

tion takes on primary importance since it is what must account for the

social character. We can no doubt define the collective assemblage as the

redundant complex of the act and the statement that necessarily accom-

plishes it. But this is still only a nominal definition; it does not even enable

us to justify our previous position that redundancy is irreducible to a sim-

ple identity (or that there is no simple identity between the statement and

the act). If we wish to move to a real definition of the collective assemblage,

we must ask of what consist these acts immanent to language that are in

redundancy with statements or constitute order-words.

These acts seem to be defined as the set of all incorporeal transforma-

tions current in a given society and attributed to the bodies of that society.

We may take the word "body" in its broadest sense (there are mental bod-

ies, souls are bodies, etc.). We must, however, distinguish between the

actions and passions affecting those bodies, and acts, which are only

noncorporeal attributes or the "expressed" of a statement. When Ducrot

asks what an act consists of, he turns precisely to the juridical assemblage,

taking the example of the judge's sentence that transforms the accused into

a convict. In effect, what takes place beforehand (the crime of which some-

one is accused), and what takes place after (the carrying out of the penalty),

are actions-passions affecting bodies (the body of the property, the body of

the victim, the body of the convict, the body of the prison); but the transfor-

mation of the accused into a convict is a pure instantaneous act or incorpo-

NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS □ 81

real attribute that is the expressed of the judge's sentence.

Peace and war

are states or interminglings of very different kinds of bodies, but the decla-

ration of a general mobilization expresses an instantaneous and incorpo-

real transformation of bodies. Bodies have an age, they mature and grow

old; but majority, retirement, any given age category, are incorporeal trans-

formations that are immediately attributed to bodies in particular socie-

ties. "You are no longer a child": this statement concerns an incorporeal

transformation, even if it applies to bodies and inserts itself into their

actions and passions. The incorporeal transformation is recognizable by

its instantaneousness, its immediacy, by the simultaneity of the statement

expressing the transformation and the effect the transformation produces;

that is why order-words are precisely dated, to the hour, minute, and sec-

ond, and take effect the moment they are dated. Love is an intermingling of

bodies that can be represented by a heart with an arrow through it, by a

union of souls, etc., but the declaration "I love you" expresses a

noncor-poreal attribute of bodies, the lover's as well as that of the loved one.

Eating bread and drinking wine are interminglings of bodies; communing

with Christ is also an intermingling of bodies, properly spiritual bodies

that are no less "real" for being spiritual. But the transformation of the

body of the bread and the wine into the body and blood of Christ is the

pure expressed of a statement attributed to the bodies. In an airplane

hijacking, the threat of a hijacker brandishing a revolver is obviously an

action; so is the execution of the hostages, if it occurs. But the

transformation of the passengers into hostages, and of the plane-body

into a prison-body, is an instantaneous incorporeal transformation, a

"mass media act" in the sense in which the English speak of "speech

acts." The order-words or assemblages of enunciation in a given society

(in short, the illocutionary) designate this instantaneous relation between

statements and the incorporeal transformations or noncorporeal attributes

they express.

The instantaneousness of the order-word, which can be projected to

infinity, placed at the origin of society, is quite strange; for Rousseau, for

example, the passage from the state of nature to the social state is like a leap

in place, an incorporeal transformation occurring at zero hour. Real his-

tory undoubtedly recounts the actions and passions of the bodies that

develop in a social field; it communicates them in a certain fashion; but it

also transmits order-words, in other words, pure acts intercalated into that

development. History will never be rid of dates. Perhaps economics or

financial analysis best demonstrates the presence and instantaneousness

of these decisive acts in an overall process (that is why statements defi-

nitely do not belong to ideology, but are already at work in what is suppos-

edly the domain of the economic base). The galloping inflation in

Germany after 1918 was a crisis affecting the monetary body, and many

82 □

NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

other bodies besides; but the sum of the "circumstances" suddenly made

possible a semiotic transformation that, although indexed to the body of

the earth and material assets, was still a pure act or incorporeal trans-

formation—November 20, 1923.. .'

The assemblages are in constant variation, are themselves constantly

subject to transformations. First, the circumstances must be taken into

account: Benveniste clearly demonstrates that a performative statement is

nothing outside of the circumstances that make it performative. Anybody

can shout, "I declare a general mobilization," but in the absence of an effec-

tuated variable giving that person the right to make such a statement it is an

act of peurility or insanity, not an act of enunciation. This is also true of "I

love you," which has neither meaning nor subject nor addressee outside of

circumstances that not only give it credibility but make it a veritable

assemblage, a power marker, even in the case of an unhappy love (it is still

by a will to power that one obeys...). The general term "circumstances"

should not leave the impression that it is a question only of external cir-

cumstances. "I swear" is not the same when said in the family, at school, in

a love affair, in a secret society, or in court: it is not the same thing, and nei-

ther is it the same statement; it is not the same bodily situation, and neither

is it the same incorporeal transformation. The transformation applies to

bodies but is itself incorporeal, internal to enunciation. There are variables

of expression that establish a relation between language and the outside, but
precisely because they are immanent to language. As long as linguistics

confines itself to constants, whether syntactical, morphological, or pho-

nological, it ties the statement to a signifier and enunciation to a subject

and accordingly botches the assemblage; it consigns circumstances to the

exterior, closes language in on itself, and makes pragmatics a residue. Prag-

matics, on the other hand, does not simply appeal to external circum-

stances: it brings to light variables of expression or of enunciation that are

so many internal reasons for language not to close itself off. As Volosinov

[Bakhtin] says, as long as linguistics extracts constants, it is incapable of help-

ing us understand how a single word can be a complete enunciation; there

must be "an extra something" that "remains outside of the scope of the entire

set of linguistic categories and definitions," even though it is still entirely

within the purview of the theory of enunciation or language.'

The order-word

is precisely that variable that makes the word as such an enunciation. The

instantaneousness of the order-word, its immediacy, gives it a power of varia-

tion in relation to the bodies to which the transformation is attributed.

Pragmatics is a politics of language. A study such as Jean-Pierre Faye's

on the constitution of Nazi statements in the German social field is in this

respect exemplary (and cannot be directly transferred to the constitution

of Fascist statements in Italy). Transformational research of this kind is

NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS □ 83

concerned with the variation of the order-words and noncorporeal attri-

butes linked to social bodies and effectuating immanent acts. We may take

as another example, under different conditions, the formation of a prop-

erly Leninist type of statement in Soviet Russia, basing ourselves on a text

by Lenin entitled "On Slogans" (1917). This text constituted an incorpo-

real transformation that extracted from the masses a proletarian class as an

assemblage of enunciation before the conditions were present for the prole-

tariat to exist as a body. A stroke of genius from the First Marxist Interna-

tional, which "invented" a new type of class: Workers of the world, unite!

Taking advantage of the break with the Social Democrats, Lenin invented

or decreed yet another incorporeal transformation that extracted from the

proletarian class a vanguard as an assemblage of enunciation and was

attributed to the "Party," a new type of party as a distinct body, at the risk of

falling into a properly bureaucratic system of redundancy. The Leninist

wager, an act of audacity? Lenin declared that the slogan {mot d'ordre) "All

power to the Soviets" was valid only from the 27th of February to the 4th of

July for the peacetime development of the Revolution, and no longer held

in the state of war; the passage from peace to war implied this transforma-

tion, not just from the masses to a guiding proletariat, but from the prole-

tariat to a directing vanguard. July 4 exactly the power of the Soviets came

to an end. All of the external circumstances can be assigned: the war as well

as the insurrection that forced Lenin to flee to Finland. But the fact

remains that the incorporeal transformation was uttered on the 4th of July,

prior to the organization of the body to which it would be attributed,

namely, the Party itself. "Every particular slogan must be deduced from the

totality of the specific features of a definite political situation."

If the

objection is leveled that these specific features pertain to politics and not

linguistics, it must be observed how thoroughly politics works language

from within, causing not only the vocabulary but also the structure and all

of the phrasal elements to vary as the order-words change. A type of state-

ment can be evaluated only as a function of its pragmatic implications, in

other words, in relation to the implicit presuppositions, immanent acts, or

incorporeal transformations it expresses and which introduce new config-

urations of bodies. True intuition is not a judgment of grammaticality but

an evaluation of internal variables of enunciation in relation to the aggre-

gate of the circumstances.

We have gone from explicit commands to order-words as implicit pre-

suppositions; from order-words to the immanent acts or incorporeal trans-

formations they express; and from there to the assemblages of enunciation

whose variables they are. To the extent these variables enter at a given

moment into determinable relations, the assemblages combine in a regime
of signs or a semiotic machine. It is obvious that a society is plied by several

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NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

semiotics, that its regimes are in fact mixed. Moreover, at a later time there

will arise new order-words that will modify the variables and will not yet be

part of a known regime. Thus the order-word is redundancy in several

ways: as a function of the process of transmission essential to it, and in

itself, from the time it is emitted, in its "immediate" relation with the act or

transformation it effectuates. The order-word is already redundancy even

when it is in rupture with a particular semiotic. That is why every state-

ment of a collective assemblage of enunciation belongs to indirect dis-

course. Indirect discourse is the presence of a reported statement within

the reporting statement, the presence of an order-word within the word.

Language in its entirety is indirect discourse. Indirect discourse in no way

supposes direct discourse; rather, the latter is extracted from the former, to

the extent that the operations of signifiance and proceedings of

subjec-tification in an assemblage are distributed, attributed, and

assigned, or that the variables of the assemblage enter into constant

relations, however temporarily. Direct discourse is a detached fragment of

a mass and is born of the dismemberment of the collective assemblage;

but the collective assemblage is always like the murmur from which I take

my proper name, the constellation of voices, concordant or not, from which

I draw my voice. I always depend on a molecular assemblage of

enunciation that is not given in my conscious mind, any more than it

depends solely on my apparent social determinations, which combine

many heterogeneous regimes of signs. Speaking in tongues. To write is

perhaps to bring this assemblage of the unconscious to the light of day, to

select the whispering voices, to gather the tribes and secret idioms from

which I extract something I call my Self (Moi). I is an order-word. A

schizophrenic said: "I heard voices say: he is conscious of life."

In this

sense, there is indeed a schizophrenic cogito, but it is a cogito that makes

self-consciousness the incorporeal transformation of an order-word, or a

result of indirect discourse. My direct discourse is still the free indirect

discourse running through me, coming from other worlds or other planets.

That is why so many artists and writers have been tempted by the seance

table. When we ask what faculty is specific to the order-word, we must

indeed attribute to it some strange characteristics: a kind of

instantaneousness in the emission, perception, and transmission of

order-words; a wide variability, and a power of forgetting permitting one to

feel absolved of the order-words one has followed and then abandoned in

order to welcome others; a properly ideal or ghostly capacity for the appre-

hension of incorporeal transformations; an aptitude for grasping language

as an immense indirect discourse.'

The faculty of the cuer and the cued, of

the song that always holds a tune within a tune in a relation of redundancy;

a faculty that is in truth mediumistic, glossolalic, or xenoglossic.

Let us return to the question of how this defines a language-function, a

NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS □ 85

function coextensive with language. It is evident that order-words, collec-

tive assemblages, or regimes of signs cannot be equated with language. But

they effectuate its condition of possibility {the superlinearity of expres-
sion), they fulfill in each instance this condition of possibility; without

them, language would remain a pure virtuality (the superlinear character

of indirect discourse). Doubtless, the assemblages vary, undergo transfor-

mation. But they do not necessarily vary by language, they do not corre-

spond to the various languages. A language seems to be defined by the

syntactical, semantic, phonological constants in its statements; the collec-

tive assemblage, on the contrary, concerns the usage of these constants in

relation to variables internal to enunciation itself (variables of expression,

immanent acts, or incorporeal transformations). Different constants, dif-

ferent languages, may have the same usage; the same constants in a given

language may have different usages, successively or even simultaneously.

We cannot content ourselves with a duality between constants as linguistic

factors that are explicit or potentially explicit, and variables as extrinsic,

nonlinguistic factors. For the pragmatic variables of usage are internal to

enunciation and constitute the implicit presuppositions of language. Thus

if the collective assemblage is in each instance coextensive with the linguis-

tic system considered, and to language as a whole, it is because it expresses

the set of incorporeal transformations that effectuate the condition of pos-

sibility of language and utilize the elements of the linguistic system. The

language-function thus defined is neither informational nor

communi-cational; it has to do neither with signifying information nor

with intersubjective communication. And it is useless to abstract a

signifiance outside information, or a subjectivity outside communication.

For the subjectification proceedings and movement of signifiance relate

to regimes of signs, or collective assemblages. The language-function is

the transmission of order-words, and order-words relate to assemblages,

just as assemblages relate to the incorporeal transformations constituting

the variables of the function. Linguistics is nothing without a pragmatics

(semiotic or political) to define the effectuation of the condition of possibil-
ity of language and the usage of linguistic elements.

II. "There Is an Abstract Machine of Language That

Does Not Appeal to Any 'Extrinsic' Factor"

If in a social field we distinguish the set of corporeal modifications and the

set of incorporeal transformations, we are presented, despite the variety in

each of the sets, with two formalizations, one of content, the other of
expression. For content is not opposed to form but has its own formal-

ization: the hand-tool pole, or the lesson of things. It is, however, opposed

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NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

to expression, inasmuch as expression also has its own formalization: the

face-language pole, the lesson of signs. Precisely because content, like

expression, has a form of its own, one can never assign the form of expres-

sion the function of simply representing, describing, or averring a corre-

sponding content: there is neither correspondence nor conformity. The

two formalizations are not of the same nature; they are independent, heter-

ogeneous. The Stoics were the first to theorize this independence: they dis-

tinguished between the actions and passions of bodies (using the word

"body" in the broadest sense, as applying to any formed content) and

incorporeal acts (the "expressed" of the statements). The form of expres-

sion is constituted by the warp of expresseds, and the form of content by the

woof of bodies. When knife cuts flesh, when food or poison spreads

through the body, when a drop of wine falls into water, there is an intermin-
gling of bodies; but the statements, "The knife is cutting the flesh," "I am

eating," "The water is turning red," express incorporeal transformations of

an entirely different nature (events).

The genius of the Stoics was to have

taken this paradox as far as it could go, up to the point of insanity and cyni-

cism, and to have grounded it in the most serious of principles: their reward

was to be the first to develop a philosophy of language.

The paradox gets us nowhere unless, like the Stoics, we add that incorpo-

real transformations, incorporeal attributes, apply to bodies, and only to

bodies. They are the expressed of statements but are attributed to bodies.

The purpose is not to describe or represent bodies; bodies already have

proper qualities, actions and passions, souls, in short forms, which are

themselves bodies. Representations are bodies too! If noncorporeal attri-

butes apply to bodies, if there are good grounds for making a distinction

between the incorporeal expressed "to become red" and the corporeal

quality "red," etc., it has nothing to with representation. We cannot even

say that the body or state of things is the "referent" of the sign. In expressing

the noncorporeal attribute, and by that token attributing it to the body, one

is not representing or referring but intervening in a way; it is a speech act.

The independence of the two kinds of forms, forms of expression and

forms of content, is not contradicted but confirmed by the fact that the

expressions or expresseds are inserted into or intervene in contents, not to

represent them but to anticipate them or move them back, slow them down

or speed them up, separate or combine them, delimit them in a different

way. The warp of the instantaneous transformations is always inserted into

the woof of the continuous modifications. (Hence the significance of dates

for the Stoics. From what moment can it be said that someone is bald? In

what sense does a statement of the type "There will be a naval battle tomor-

row" constitute a date or order-word?) The night of August 4, July 4,1917,

November 20, 1923: What incorporeal transformation is expressed by

NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS □ 87

these dates, incorporeal yet attributed to bodies, inserted into them? The

independence of the form of expression and the form of content is not the

basis for a parallelism between them or a representation of one by the other,

but on the contrary a parceling of the two, a manner in which expressions

are inserted into contents, in which we ceaselessly jump from one register

to another, in which signs are at work in things themselves just as things

extend into or are deployed through signs. An assemblage of enunciation

does not speak "of" things; it speaks on the same level as states of things and

states of content. So that the same x, the same particle, may function either

as a body that acts and undergoes actions or as a sign constituting an act or

order-word, depending on which form it is taken up by (for example, the

theoretico-experimental aggregate of physics). In short, the functional in-

dependence of the two forms is only the form of their reciprocal presup-

position, and of the continual passage from one to the other. We are never

presented with an interlinkage of order-words and a causality of contents

each in its own right; nor do we see one represent the other, with the second

serving as referent. On the contrary, the independence of the two lines is

distributive, such that a segment of one always forms a relay with a segment

of the other, slips into, introduces itself into the other. We constantly pass

from order-words to the "silent order" of things, as Foucault puts it, and

vice versa.

But when we use a word as vague as "intervene," when we say that

expressions intervene or insert themselves into contents, are we not still

prey to a kind of idealism in which the order-word instantaneously falls

from the sky? What we must determine is not an origin but points of inter-

vention or insertion in the framework of the reciprocal presupposition of

the two forms. Both forms of content and forms of expression are insepara-

ble from a movement of deterritorialization that carries them away. Both

expression and content are more or less deterritorialized, relatively

deterritorialized, according to the particular state of their form. In this

respect, one cannot posit a primacy of expression over content, or content

over expression. Sometimes the semiotic components are more deter-

ritorialized than the material components, and sometimes the reverse. For

example, a mathematical complex of signs may be more deterritorialized

than a set of particles; conversely, the particles may have experimental

effects that deterritorialize the semiotic system. A criminal action may be

deterritorializing in relation to the existing regime of signs (the earth cries

for revenge and crumbles beneath my feet, my offense is too great); but the

sign that expresses the act of condemnation may in turn be deter-

ritorializing in relation to all actions and reactions ("a fugitive and a

vagabond shalt thou be in the earth" [Gen. 4:12], you cannot even be

killed). In short, there are degrees of deterritorialization that quantify the

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respective forms and according to which contents and expression are

conjugated, feed into each other, accelerate each other, or on the contrary

become stabilized and perform a reterritorialization. What we call circum-

stances or variables are these degrees themselves. There are variables of
content, or proportions in the interminglings or aggregations of bodies, and

there are variables of expression, factors internal to enunciation. Germany,

toward November 20, 1923: on the one hand, the deterritorializing infla-

tion of the monetary body and, on the other, in response to the inflation, a

semiotic transformation of the reichsmark into the rentenmark, making

possible a reterritorialization. Russia, toward July 4,1917: on the one hand

proportions of a state of "bodies" Soviets-provisional government, and on

the other the elaboration of a Bolshevik incorporeal semiotic, accelerating

things and contributing to the action of the detonating body of the Party. In

short, the way an expression relates to a content is not by uncovering or rep-

resenting it. Rather, forms of expression and forms of content communi-

cate through a conjunction of their quanta of relative deterritorialization,

each intervening, operating in the other.

We may draw some general conclusions on the nature of Assemblages

from this. On a first, horizontal, axis, an assemblage comprises two seg-

ments, one of content, the other of expression. On the one hand it is a
machinic assemblage of bodies, of actions and passions, an intermingling

of bodies reacting to one another; on the other hand it is a collective assem-
blage of enunciation, of acts and statements, of incorporeal transforma-

tions attributed to bodies. Then on a vertical axis, the assemblage has both
territorial sides, or reterritorialized sides, which stabilize it, and cutting
edges of deterritorialization, which carry it away. No one is better than

Kafka at differentiating the two axes of the assemblage and making them

function together. On the one hand, the ship-machine, the hotel-machine,

the circus-machine, the castle-machine, the court-machine, each with its

own intermingled pieces, gears, processes, and bodies contained in one

another or bursting out of containment (see the head bursting through the

roof)

On the other hand, the regime of signs or of enunciation: each

regime with its incorporeal transformations, acts, death sentences and

judgments, proceedings, "law." It is obvious that statements do not repre-

sent machines: the Stoker's discourse does not describe stoking as a body; it

has its own form, and a development without resemblance.

Yet it is

attributed to bodies, to the whole ship as a body. A discourse of submission

to order-words; a discourse of discussion, claims, accusation, and defense.

On the second axis, what is compared or combined of the two aspects, what

always inserts one into the other, are the sequenced or conjugated degrees

of deterritorialization, and the operations of reterritorialization that stabi-

lize the aggregate at a given moment. K., the K.-function, designates the

NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS □ 89

line of flight or deterritorialization that carries away all of the assemblages

but also undergoes all kinds of reterritorializations and redundancies—

redundancies of childhood, village-life, love, bureaucracy, etc.

The tetravalence of the assemblage. Taking the feudal assemblage as an

example, we would have to consider the interminglings of bodies defining

feudalism: the body of the earth and the social body; the body of the over-

lord, vassal, and serf; the body of the knight and the horse and their new

relation to the stirrup; the weapons and tools assuring a symbiosis of

bodies—a whole machinic assemblage. We would also have to consider

statements, expressions, the juridical regime of heraldry, all of the incorpo-

real transformations, in particular, oaths and their variables (the oath of

obedience, but also the oath of love, etc.): the collective assemblage of

enunciation. On the other axis, we would have to consider the feudal

territorialities and reterritorializations, and at the same time the line of

deterritorialization that carries away both the knight and his mount, state-

ments and acts. We would have to consider how all this combines in the

Crusades.

It would be an error to believe that content determines expression by

causal action, even if expression is accorded the power not only to "reflect"

content but to react upon it in an active way. This kind of ideological con-

ception of the statement, which subordinates it to a primary economic con-

tent, runs into all kinds of difficulties inherent to dialectics. First, although

it may be possible to conceive of a causal action moving from content to

expression, the same cannot be said for the respective forms, the form of

content and the form of expression. We must recognize that expression is

independent and that this is precisely what enables it to react upon con-

tents. This independence, however, has been poorly conceived. If contents

are said to be economic, the form of content cannot be said to be economic

and is reduced to a pure abstraction, namely, the production of goods and

the means of that production considered in themselves. Similarly, if ex-

pressions are said to be ideological, the form of expression is not said to be

ideological and is reduced to language as abstraction, as the availability of a

good shared by all. Those who take this approach claim to characterize

contents and expressions by all the struggles and conflicts pervading them

in two different forms, but these forms themselves are exempt from strug-

gle and conflict, and the relation between them remains entirely indeter-

minate.

The only way to define the relation is to revamp the theory of

ideology by saying that expressions and statements intervene directly in

productivity, in the form of a production of meaning or sign-value. The

category of production doubtless has the advantage of breaking with

schemas of representation, information, and communication. But is it any

more adequate than these schemas? Its application to language is very

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NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

ambiguous in that it appeals to an ongoing dialectical miracle of the

transformation of matter into meaning, content into expression, the social

process into a signifying system.

We think the material or machinic aspect of an assemblage relates not to

the production of goods but rather to a precise state of intermingling of

bodies in a society, including all the attractions and repulsions, sympathies

and antipathies, alterations, amalgamations, penetrations, and expansions

that affect bodies of all kinds in their relations to one another. What

regulates the obligatory, necessary, or permitted interminglings of bodies

is above all an alimentary regime and a sexual regime. Even technology

makes the mistake of considering tools in isolation: tools exist only in rela-

tion to the interminglings they make possible or that make them possible.

The stirrup entails a new man-horse symbiosis that at the same time entails

new weapons and new instruments. Tools are inseparable from symbioses

or amalgamations defining a Nature-Society machinic assemblage. They

presuppose a social machine that selects them and takes them into its "phy-

lum": a society is defined by its amalgamations, not by its tools. Similarly,

the semiotic or collective aspect of an assemblage relates not to a produc-

tivity of language but to regimes of signs, to a machine of expression whose

variables determine the usage of language elements. These elements do not

stand on their own any more than tools do. There is a primacy of the

machinic assemblage of bodies over tools and goods, a primacy of the col-

lective assemblage of enunciation over language and words. The articula-

tion of the two aspects of the assemblage is effected by the movements of

deterritorialization that quantify their forms. That is why a social field is

defined less by its conflicts and contradictions than by the lines of flight

running through it. An assemblage has neither base nor superstructure,

neither deep structure nor superficial structure; it flattens all of its dimen-

sions onto a single plane of consistency upon which reciprocal presupposi-

tions and mutual insertions play themselves out.

The other mistake (which is combined with the first as needed) is to

believe in the adequacy of the form of expression as a linguistic system.

This system may be conceived as a signifying phonological structure, or as

a deep syntactical structure. In either case, it is credited with engendering

semantics, therefore of fulfilling expression, whereas contents are rele-

gated to the arbitrariness of a simple "reference" and pragmatics to the

exteriority of nonlinguistic factors. What all of these undertakings have in

common is to erect an abstract machine of language, but as a synchronic set

of constants. We will not object that the machine thus conceived is too

abstract. On the contrary, it is not abstract enough, it remains "linear." It

remains on an intermediate level of abstraction allowing it to consider lin-

guistic factors in themselves, independently of nonlinguistic factors, and

NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS □ 91

to treat those linguistic factors as constants. But if the abstraction is taken
further, one necessarily reaches a level where the pseudoconstants of lan-
guage are superseded by variables of expression internal to enunciation
itself; these variables of expression are then no longer separable from the
variables of content with which they are in perpetual interaction. If the
external pragmatics of nonlinguistic factors must be taken into considera-
tion, it is because linguistics itself is inseparable from an internal prag-
matics involving its own factors. It is not enough to take into account the
signified, or even the referent, because the very notions of signification
and reference are bound up with a supposedly autonomous and constant
structure. There is no use constructing a semantics, or even recognizing a
certain validity to pragmatics, if they are still pretreated by a phonological
or syntactical machine. For a true abstract machine pertains to an assem-
blage in its entirety: it is defined as the diagram of that assemblage. It is not
language based but diagrammatic and superlinear. Content is not a signi-
fied nor expression a signifier; rather, both are variables of the assemblage.
We get nowhere until the pragmatic, but also semantic, syntactical, and
phonological determinations are directly linked to the assemblages of
enunciation upon which they depend. Chomsky's abstract machine retains
an arborescent model and a linear ordering of linguistic elements in sen-
tences and sentence combinations. But as soon as pragmatic values or
internal variables are taken into account, in particular with respect to indi-
rect discourse, one is obliged to bring "hypersentences" into play or to con-
struct "abstract objects" (incorporeal transformations). This implies
superlinearity, in other words, a plane whose elements no longer have a
fixed linear order: the rhizome model.

From this standpoint, the

inter-penetration of language and the social field and political problems
lies at the deepest level of the abstract machine, not at the surface. The
abstract machine as it relates to the diagram of the assemblage is never
purely a matter of language, except for lack of sufficient abstraction. It is
language that depends on the abstract machine, not the reverse. At most,
we may distinguish in the abstract machine two states of the diagram,
one in which variables of content and expression are distributed according
to their heterogeneous forms in reciprocal presupposition on a plane of
consistency, and another in which it is no longer even possible to
distinguish between variables of content and expression because the
variability of that same plane has prevailed over the duality of forms,
rendering them "indiscernible." (The first state relates to still relative
movements of deterritori-alization; in the second, an absolute threshold
of deterritorialization has been reached.)

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III. "There Are Constants or Universals of Language That Enable Us to

Define It as a Homogeneous System"

The question of structural invariants—and the very idea of structure is

inseparable from invariants, whether atomic or relational—is essential to

linguistics. It is what allows linguistics to claim a basis in pure scientificity,

to be nothing but science ... safe from any supposedly external or prag-

matic factor. The question of invariants assumes several closely connected

forms: (1) the constants of a language (phonological, by commutativity;

syntactical, by transformativity; semantic, by generativity); (2) the uni-

versals of language (by decomposition of the phoneme into distinctive

features; of syntax into fundamental constituents; of signification into

minimal semantic elements); (3) trees linking constants to one another,

with binary relations between trees (see Chomsky's linear arborescent

method); (4) competence, in principle coextensive with language and

defined by judgments of grammaticality; (5) homogeneity, bearing on ele-

ments and relations as well as intuitive judgments; (6) synchrony, which

erects an "in-itself' and a "for-itself' of language, perpetually moving from

the objective system to the subjective consciousness that apprehends its

principle (that of the linguist himself or herself).

One can juggle all of these factors, subtract some or even add new ones.

They go together, however, because the essentials of all of them are present

on the level of any one. For example, the distinction between speech and

language is recapitulated in the distinction between competence and per-

formance, but at the level of grammaticality. If it is objected that the dis-

tinction between competence and performance is entirely relative (a

linguistic competence can be economic, religious, political, or aesthetic,

etc.; the teaching competence of a grade school teacher may be only a per-

formance in relation to the judgment of an inspector or government regula-

tions), linguists respond that they are willing to multiply levels of

competence, and even to introduce pragmatic values into the system.

Brekle, for example, proposes adding an "idiosyncratic performatory com-

petence" factor tied to a whole constellation of linguistic, psychological, or

sociological factors. But what use is this injection of pragmatics if

pragmatics is in turn considered to have constants or universals of its own?

And in what way are expressions like "I," "promise," "know" more univer-

sal than "greet," "name," or "condemn"?

Similarly, when efforts are

made to make Chomsky's trees bud and to shatter linear order, as long as

the pragmatic components marking the ruptures are placed above the tree

or effaced from the derivation nothing has really been accomplished, one

has failed to constitute a rhizome.

In truth, the nature of the abstract

machine is the most general problem: there is no reason to tie the abstract

NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS □ 93

to the universal or the constant, or to efface the singularity of abstract
machines insofar as they are built around variables and variations.

The debate between Chomsky and Labov will give us a better under-

standing of what the issue is. Every language is an essentially heterogene-
ous reality; linguists know this and say so. But this is a factual remark.
Chomsky asks only that one carve from this aggregate a homogeneous or
standard system as a basis for abstraction or idealization, making possible
a scientific study of principles. Limiting oneself to standard English is thus
not the issue, for even a linguist who studies Black English or the English of
the ghettos is obliged to extract a standard system guaranteeing the con-
stancy and homogeneity of the object under study (no science can operate
any other way, they say). Thus Chomsky pretends to believe that by assert-
ing his interest in the variable features of language, Labov is situating him-
self in a de facto pragmatics external to linguistics.

Labov, however, has

other ambitions. When he brings to light lines of inherent variation, he does
not see them simply as "free variants" pertaining to pronunciation, style,
or nonpertinent features that lie outside the system and leave the homoge-
neity of the system intact; neither does he see them as a de facto mix
between two systems, each homogeneous in its own right, as if the speaker
moved from one to the other. He refuses the alternative linguistics set up
for itself: assigning variants to different systems, or relegating them to a
place outside the structure. It is the variation itself that is systematic, in the
sense in which musicians say that "the theme is the variation." Labov sees
variation as a de jure component affecting each system from within, send-
ing it cascading or leaping on its own power and forbidding one to close it
off, to make it homogeneous in principle. Labov does consider variables of
all kinds, phonetic, phonological, syntactical, semantic, stylistic. Yet it
would seem difficult to accuse him of missing the distinction between the
de jure and the de facto—or between linguistics and stylistics, or
synchrony and diachrony, or pertinent and nonpertinent features, or com-
petence and performance, or the grammaticality of language and the
agrammaticality of speech. Although this may be hardening his positions,
we would say rather that Labov proposes a different distribution of the de
facto and the de jure, and especially a different conception of the de jure
itself and of abstraction. He takes the example of a young black person
who, in a very short series of phrases, seems to pass from the Black English
system to the standard system eighteen times. Is it not the abstract distinc-
tion between the two systems that proves arbitrary and insufficient? For
the majority of the forms belongs to one or the other only by virtue of the
fortuities of a given sequence. Must it not be admitted that every system is
in variation and is defined not by its constants and homogeneity but on the

94 □ NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

contrary by a variability whose characteristics are immanent, continuous, and

regulated in a very specific mode (variable or optional rules)?

How can we conceptualize this continuous variation at work within a

language, even if it means overstepping the limits Labov sets for himself as

well as the conditions of scientificity invoked by linguistics? In the course

of a single day, an individual repeatedly passes from language to language.

He successively speaks as "father to son" and as a boss; to his lover, he

speaks an infantilized language; while sleeping he is plunged into an oniric

discourse, then abruptly returns to a professional language when the tele-

phone rings. It will be objected that these variations are extrinsic, that it is

still the same language. But that is to prejudge the question. First, it is not

certain that the phonology is the same, nor the syntax, nor the semantics.

Second, the whole question is whether this supposedly identical language

is defined by invariants or, on the contrary, by the line of continuous varia-

tion running through it. Some linguists have suggested that linguistic

change occurs less by systemic rupture than by a gradual modification of

frequency, by a coexistence and continuity of different usages. Take as an

example the statement, "I swear!" It is a different statement depending on

whether it is said by a child to his or her father, by a man in love to his loved

one, or by a witness before the court. These are like three sequences. (Or

Messiaen's four "amen"s stretched over seven sequences.) Once again,

there is no reason to say that the variables are merely situational, and that

the statement remains constant in principle. Not only are there as many

statements as there are effectuations, but all of the statements are present

in the effectuation of one among them, so that the line of variation is vir-

tual, in other words, real without being actual, and consequently continu-

ous regardless of the leaps the statement makes. To place the statement in

continuous variation is to send it through all the prosodic, semantic, syn-

tactical, and phonological variables that can affect it in the shortest

moment of time (the smallest interval). Build the continuum of "I swear!"

with the corresponding transformations. This is the standpoint of

pragmatics, but a pragmatics internal to language, immanent, including

variations of linguistic elements of all kinds. For example, Kafka's line of

the three proceedings: the father's proceedings in the family; the engage-

ment proceedings at the hotel; and the court proceedings. There is a con-

stant tendency to seek a "reduction": everything is explained by the

situation of the child in relation to its father, or of the man in relation to

castration, or of the citizen in relation to the law. But this is to content one-

self with extracting a pseudoconstant of content, which is no better than

extracting a pseudoconstant of expression. Placing-in-variation allows us

to avoid these dangers, because it builds a continuum or medium without

beginning or end. Continuous variation should not be confused with the

NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS D 95

continuous or discontinuous character of the variable itself: the

order-word, a continuous variation for a discontinuous variable ... A

variable can be continuous over a portion of its trajectory, then leap or skip,

without that affecting its continuous variation; what this does is impose an

absent development as an "alternative continuity" that is virtual yet real.

A constant or invariant is defined less by its permanence and duration

than by its function as a center, if only relative. In the tonal or diatonic sys-

tem of music, laws of resonance and attraction determine centers valid for

all modes and endowed with stability and attractive power (pouvoir). These

centers therefore organize distinct, distinctive, forms that are clearly estab-

lished for a certain amount of time: a linear, codified, centered system of

the arborescent type. It is true that the minor "mode" gives tonal music a

decentered, runaway, fugitive character due to the nature of its intervals

and the lesser stability of its chords. This mode thus has the ambiguity of

undergoing operations that align it to a major model or standard at the

same time as it continues to display a certain modal power (puissance) irre-

ducible to tonality, as though music set out on a journey and garnered all

resurgences, phantoms of the Orient, imaginary lands, traditions from all

over. But temperament, tempered chromaticism has an even greater ambi-

guity: stretching the action of the center to the most distant tones, but also

preparing the disaggregation of the central principle, replacing the cen-

tered forms of continuous development with a form that constantly dis-

solves and transforms itself. When development subordinates form and

spans the whole, as in Beethoven, variation begins to free itself and

becomes identified with creation. But when chromaticism is unleashed,

becomes a generalized chromaticism, turns back against temperament,

affecting not only pitches but all sound components—durations, intensi-

ties, timbre, attacks—it becomes impossible to speak of a sound form

organizing matter; it is no longer even possible to speak of a continuous

development of form. Rather, it is a question of a highly complex and elab-

orate material making audible nonsonorous forces. The couple

matter-form is replaced by the coupling material-forces. The synthesizer

has taken the place of the old "a priori synthetic judgment," and all

functions change accordingly. By placing all its components in continuous

variation, music itself becomes a superlinear system, a rhizome instead of

a tree, and enters the service of a virtual cosmic continuum of which even

holes, silences, ruptures, and breaks are a part. Thus the important thing is

certainly not to establish a pseudobreak between the tonal system and

atonal music; the latter, on the contrary, in breaking away from the tonal

system, only carried temperament to its ultimate conclusion (although no

Viennese stopped there). The essential thing is almost the opposite

movement: the ferment in the tonal system itself (during much of the

nineteenth and twentieth cen-

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turies) that dissolved temperament and widened chromaticism while pre-

serving a relative tonality, which reinvented new modalities, brought a new

amalgamation of major and minor, and in each instance conquered realms

of continuous variation for this variable or that. This ferment came to the

forefront and made itself heard in its own right; and, through the molecular

material thus wrought, it made audible the nonsonorous forces of the

cosmos that have always agitated music—a bit of Time in the pure state,

grain of absolute Intensity... The words "tonal," "modal," "atonal" do not

mean much. Music is not alone in being art as cosmos and in drawing the

virtual lines of an infinite variation.

Once again, the objection will be raised that music is not a language, that

the components of sound are not pertinent features of language, that there

is no correspondence between the two. We are not suggesting any corre-

spondence. We keep asking that the issue be left open, that any presup-

posed distinction be rejected. This especially applies to the

language-speech distinction, which is used to relegate all kinds of

variables at work within expression and enunciation to a position outside

language. The Voice-Music relation proposed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,

on the other hand, could have taken not only phonetics and prosody but all

of linguistics in a different direction. The voice in music has always been

a privileged axis of experimentation, playing simultaneously on language

and sound. Music has linked the voice to instruments in various ways; but

as long as the voice is song, its main role is to "hold" sound, it functions as

a constant circumscribed on a note and accompanied by the instrument.

Only when the voice is tied to timbre does it reveal a tessitura that

renders it heterogeneous to itself and gives it a power of continuous

variation: it is then no longer accompanied, but truly "machined," it

belongs to a musical machine that prolongs or superposes on a single

plane parts that are spoken, sung, achieved by special effects, instrumental,

or perhaps electronically generated. This is the sound plane of a

generalized "glissando" implying the constitution of a statistical space in

which each variable has, not an average value, but a probability of

frequency that places it in continuous variation with the other variables.

Luciano Berio's Visage (Face) and Dieter Schnebel's Glossolalie

(Speaking in tongues) are typical examples of this. And despite what Berio

himself says, it is less a matter of using pseudoconstants to produce a

simulacrum of language or a metaphor for the voice than of attaining that

secret neuter language without constants and entirely in indirect discourse

where the synthesizer and the instrument speak no less than the voice, and

the voice plays no less than the instrument. It should not be thought that

music has forgotten how to sing in a now mechanical and atomized

world; rather, an immense coefficient of variation is affecting and carrying

away all of the phatic, aphatic, linguistic,

NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS □ 97

poetic, instrumental, or musical parts of a single sound assemblage—"a

simple scream suffusing all degrees" (Thomas Mann). There are many pro-

cedures for placing the voice in variation, not only Sprechgesang

(speech-song), which constantly leaves pitch behind by descent or ascent,

but also circular breathing techniques and zones of resonance in which

several voices seem to issue from the same mouth. Secret languages are

very significant in this connection, in learned as well as popular music.

Certain ethnomusicologists have found extraordinary cases (in Dahomey,

for example) where a first, diatonic, vocal part is superseded by a

chromatic descent into a secret language that slips from one sound to the

next in a continuous fashion, modulating a sound continuum into smaller

and smaller intervals until it becomes a "parlando" all of the intervals of

which blur together—and then the diatonic part is itself transposed

according to the chromatic levels of a terraced architecture, the song

sometimes interrupted by a parlando, by a simple conversation lacking

definite pitch.

It is perhaps characteristic of secret languages, slangs,

jargons, professional languages, nursery rhymes, merchants' cries to stand

out less for their lexical inventions or rhetorical figures than for the way

in which they effect continuous variations of the common elements of

language. They are chromatic languages, close to a musical notation. A

secret language does not merely have a hidden cipher or code still

operating by constants and forming a subsystem; it places the public
language's system of variables in a state ofvariation.

This is what we are getting at: a generalized chromaticism. Placing ele-

ments of any nature in continuous variation is an operation that will per-

haps give rise to new distinctions, but takes none as final and has none in

advance. On the contrary, this operation in principle bears on the voice,

speech, language, and music simultaneously. There is no reason to make

prior, principled distinctions. Linguistics in general is still in a kind of

major mode, still has a sort of diatonic scale and a strange taste for domi-

nants, constants, and universals. All languages, in the meantime, are in

immanent continuous variation: neither synchrony nor diachrony, but

asynchrony, chromaticism as a variable and continuous state of language.

For a chromatic linguistics according pragmatism its intensities and

values.

What is called a style can be the most natural thing in the world; it is

nothing other than the procedure of a continuous variation. Of the dual-

isms established by linguistics, there are few with a more shaky foundation

than the separation between linguistics and stylistics: Because a style is not

an individual psychological creation but an assemblage of enunciation, it

unavoidably produces a language within a language. Take an arbitrary list

of authors we are fond of: Kafka once again, Beckett, Gherasim Luca, Jean-

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Luc Godard. It will be noted that they are all more or less in a bilingual situ-

ation: Kafka, the Czechoslovakian Jew writing in German; Beckett, the

Irishman writing in English and French; Luca, originally from Romania;

Godard and his will to be Swiss. But this is only circumstantial, an oppor-

tunity, and the opportunity can be found elsewhere. It will also be noted

that many of them are not only or not primarily writers (Beckett and

theater and television, Godard and film and television, Luca and his

audiovisual machines). The reason for this is that when one submits lin-

guistic elements to a treatment producing continuous variation, when one

introduces an internal pragmatics into language, one is necessarily led to

treat nonlinguistic elements such as gestures and instruments in the same

fashion, as if the two aspects of pragmatics joined on the same line of varia-

tion, in the same continuum. Moreover, the idea perhaps comes first from

outside, with language following only later, as with the necessarily exterior

sources of a style. But the essential thing is that each of these authors has his

own procedure of variation, his own widened chromaticism, his own mad

production of speeds and intervals. The creative stammering of Gherasim

Luca, in the poem "Passionnement" (Passionately).

Godard's is another

kind of stammering. In theater: Robert Wilson's whispering, without defi-

nite pitch, and Carmelo Bene's ascending and descending variations.

It's

easy to stammer, but making language itself stammer is a different affair; it

involves placing all linguistic, and even nonlinguistic, elements in varia-

tion, both variables of expression and variables of content. A new form of

redundancy,

AND

...

AND

...

AND

... There has always been a struggle in

language between the verb etre (to be) and the conjunction et (and) between
est and et (is and and [which in French are identical in pronunciation—

Trans.]) It is only in appearance that these two terms are in accord and

combine, for the first acts in language as a constant and forms the diatonic

scale of language, while the second places everything in variation, consti-

tuting the lines of a generalized chromaticism. From one to the other,

everything shifts. Writers in British or American English have been more

conscious than the French of this struggle and the stakes involved, and of

the valence of the "and."

It was Proust who said that "masterpieces are

written in a kind of foreign language." That is the same as stammering,

making language stammer rather than stammering in speech. To be a for-

eigner, but in one's own tongue, not only when speaking a language other

than one's own. To be bilingual, multilingual, but in one and the same lan-

guage, without even a dialect or patois. To be a bastard, a half-breed, but

through a purification of race. That is when style becomes a language. That

is when language becomes intensive, a pure continuum of values and inten-

sities. That is when all of language becomes secret, yet has nothing to hide,

as opposed to when one carves out a secret subsystem within language. One

NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS □ 99

attains this result only by sobriety, creative subtraction. Continuous varia-

tion has only ascetic lines, a touch of herb and pure water.

It is possible to take any linguistic variable and place it in variation fol-

lowing a necessarily virtual continuous line between two of its states. We

are no longer in the situation of linguists who expect the constants of lan-

guage to experience a kind of mutation or undergo the effects of changes

accumulated in speech alone. Lines of change or creation are fully and

directly a part of the abstract machine. Hjelmslev remarked that a language

necessarily includes unexploited possibilities or potentialities and that the

abstract machine must include these possibilities or potentialities.

"Potential" and "virtual" are not at all in opposition to "real"; on the con-

trary, the reality of the creative, or the placing-in-continuous variation of

variables, is in opposition only to the actual determination of their con-

stant relations. Each time we draw a line of variation, the variables are of a

particular nature (phonological, syntactical or grammatical, semantic, and

so on), but the line itself is apertinent, asyntactic or agrammatical,

asemantic. Agrammaticality, for example, is no longer a contingent char-

acteristic of speech opposed to the grammaticality of language; rather, it is

the ideal characteristic of a line placing grammatical variables in a state of

continuous variation. Let us take Nicolas Ruwet's examples of certain sin-

gular expressions of Cummings's: "he danced his did," or "they went their

came." It is possible to reconstitute the variations through which the gram-

matical variables pass in virtuality in order to end up as agrammatical

expressions of this kind ("he did his dance," "he danced his dance," "he

danced what he did,"...; "they went as they came," "they went their way,"

.. .).

In spite of Ruwet's structural interpretation, we should avoid taking

the view that the atypical expression is produced by the successive correct

forms. It is instead the atypical expression that produces the

placing-in-variation of the correct forms, uprooting them from their state

as constants. The atypical expression constitutes a cutting edge of

deterritorialization of language, it plays the role of tensor; in other words, it

causes language to tend toward the limit of its elements, forms, or notions,

toward a near side or a beyond of language. The tensor effects a kind of

transitivization of the phrase, causing the last term to react upon the pre-

ceding term, back through the entire chain. It assures an intensive and

chromatic treatment of language. An expression as simple as AND . . . can

play the role of tensor for all of language. In this sense,

AND

is less a

conjunction than the atypical expression of all of the possible conjunctions

it places in continuous variation. The tensor, therefore, is not reducible

either to a constant or a variable, but assures the variation of the variable

by subtracting in each instance the value of the constant (n - 1). Tensors

coincide with no linguistic category; nevertheless they are pragmatic

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NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

values essential to both assemblages of enunciation and indirect discourses.

Some believe that these variations do not express the usual labor of cre-

ation in language and remain marginal, confined to poets, children, and

lunatics. That is because they wish to define the abstract machine by con-

stants that can be modified only secondarily, by a cumulative effect or

syntagmatic mutation. But the abstract machine of language is not univer-

sal, or even general, but singular; it is not actual, but virtual-real; it has, not

invariable or obligatory rules, but optional rules that ceaselessly vary with

the variation itself, as in a game in which each move changes the rules. That

is why abstract machines and assemblages of enunciation are complemen-

tary, and present in each other. The abstract machine is like the diagram of

an assemblage. It draws lines of continuous variation, while the concrete

assemblage treats variables and organized their highly diverse relations as a

function of those lines. The assemblage negotiates variables at this or that

level of variation, according to this or that degree of deterritorialization,

and determines which variables will enter into constant relations or obey

obligatory rules and which will serve instead as a fluid matter for variation.

We should not conclude from this that the assemblage brings only a certain

resistance or inertia to bear against the abstract machine; for even "con-

stants" are essential to the determination of the virtualities through which

the variation passes, they are themselves optionally chosen. There is

indeed braking and resistance at a certain level, but at another level of the

assemblage there is nothing but a come-and-go between different types of

variables, and corridors of passage traveled in both directions: the varia-

bles effectuate the machine in unison, in the sum of their relations. There is

therefore no basis for a distinction between a constant and collective lan-

guage, and variable and individual speech acts. The abstract machine is

always singular, designated by the proper mane of a group or individual,

while the assemblage of enunciation is always collective, in the individual

as in the group. The Lenin abstract machine, and the Bolshevik collective

assemblage .. . The same goes for literature, for music. There is no primacy

of the individual; there is instead an indissolubility of a singular Abstract

and a collective Concrete. The abstract machine does not exist indepen-

dently of the assemblage, any more than the assemblage functions inde-

pendently of the machine.

IV. "Language Can Be Scientifically Studied Only under the Conditions

of a Standard or Major Language"

Since everybody knows that language is a heterogeneous, variable reality, what

is the meaning of the linguists' insistence on carving out a homoge-

NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS □ 101

neous system in order to make a scientific study possible? It is a question of

extracting a set of constants from the variables, or of determining constant

relations between variables (this is already evident in the phonologists'

concept of commutativity). But the scientific model taking language as an

object of study is one with the political model by which language is homog-

enized, centralized, standardized, becoming a language of power, a major

or dominant language. Linguistics can claim all it wants to be science,

nothing but pure science—it wouldn't be the first time that the order of

pure science was used to secure the requirements of another order. What is

grammaticality, and the sign S, the categorical symbol that dominates

statements? It is a power marker before it is a syntactical marker, and

Chomsky's trees establish constant relations between power variables.

Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the

prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be

ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions.

The unity of language is fundamentally political. There is no mother

tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language that at times

advances along a broad front, and at times swoops down on diverse centers

simultaneously. We can conceive of several ways for a language to homoge-

nize, centralize: the republican way is not necessarily the same as the royal

way, and is not the least harsh.

The scientific enterprise of extracting con-

stants and constant relations is always coupled with the political enterprise

of imposing them on speakers and transmitting order-words.

Speak white and loud

yes what a wonderful language

for hiring

giving orders

appointing the hour of death in the works

and of the break that refreshes . . .

Must a distinction then be made between two kinds of languages, "high"

and "low," major and minor? The first would be defined precisely by the

power (pouvoir) of constants, the second by the power (puissance) of varia-

tion. We do not simply wish to make an opposition between the unity of a

major language and the multiplicity of dialects. Rather, each dialect has a

zone of transition and variation; or better, each minor language has a prop-

erly dialectical zone of variation. According to Malmberg, it is rare to find

clear boundaries on dialect maps; instead, there are transitional and

limitrophe zones, zones of indiscernibility. It is also said that "the

Quebecois language is so rich in modulations and variations of regional

accents and in games with tonic accents that it sometimes seems, with no

exaggeration, that it would be better preserved by musical notation than by

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any system of spelling."

The very notion of dialect is quite questionable.

Moreover, it is relative because one needs to know in relation to what major

language it exercises its function: for example, the Quebecois language

must be evaluated not only in relation to standard French but also in rela-

tion to major English, from which it borrows all kinds of phonetic and syn-

tactical elements, in order to set them in variation. The Bantu dialects

must be evaluated not only in relation to the mother tongue but also in rela-

tion to Afrikaans as a major language, and English as a counter-major lan-

guage preferred by blacks.

In short, the notion of dialect does not

elucidate that of minor language, but the other way around; it is the minor

language that defines dialects through its own possibilities for variation.

Should we identify major and minor languages on the basis of regional situ-

ations of bilingualism or multilingualism including at least one dominant

language and one dominated language, or a world situation giving certain

languages an imperialist power over others (for example, the role of Ameri-

can English today)?

At least two things prevent us from adopting this point of view. As

Chomsky notes, a dialect, ghetto language, or minor language is not

immune to the kind of treatment that draws a homogeneous system from it

and extracts constants: Black English has its own grammar, which is not

defined by a sum of mistakes or infractions against standard English; but

that grammar can be studied only by applying to it the same rules of study

that are applied to standard English. In this sense, the notions of major and

minor seem to have no linguistic relevance. When French lost its world-

wide major function it lost nothing of its constancy and homogeneity, its

centralization. Conversely, Afrikaans attained homogeneity when it was a

locally minor language struggling against English. Even politically, espe-

cially politically, it is difficult to see how the upholders of a minor language

can operate if not by giving it (if only by writing in it) a constancy and

homogeneity making it a locally major language capable of forcing official

recognition (hence the political role of writers who assert the rights of a

minor language). But the opposite argument seems more compelling: the

more a language has or acquires the characteristics of a major language, the

more it is affected by continuous variations that transpose it into a

"minor" language. It is futile to criticize the worldwide imperialism of a

language by denouncing the corruptions it introduces into other languages

(for example, the purists' criticisms of English influences in French, the

petit-bourgeois or academic denunciation of "Franglais"). For if a lan-

guage such as British English or American English is major on a world

scale, it is necessarily worked upon by all the minorities of the world, using

very diverse procedures of variation. Take the way Gaelic and Irish English

set English in variation. Or the way Black English and any number of

NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS □ 103

"ghetto languages" set American English in variation, to the point that

New York is virtually a city without a language. (Furthermore, American

English could not have constituted itself without this linguistic labor of the

minorities.) Or the linguistic situation in the old Austrian empire: German

was a major language in relation to the minorities, but as such it could not

avoid being treated by those minorities in a way that made it a minor

language in relation to the German of the Germans. There is no language

that does not have intralinguistic, endogenous, internal minorities. So at

the most general level of linguistics, Chomsky's and Labov's positions are

constantly passing and converting into each other. Chomsky can say that

even a minor, dialectical, or ghetto language cannot be studied unless

invariants are extracted from it and "extrinsic or mixed" variables are

eliminated; and Labov can respond that even a standard or major language

cannot be studied independently of "inherent" variations, which are pre-

cisely neither mixed nor extrinsic. You will never find a homogeneous sys-
tem that is not still or already affected by a regulated, continuous, immanent
process of variation (why does Chomsky pretend not to understand this?).

There are not, therefore, two kinds of languages but two possible treat-

ments of the same language. Either the variables are treated in such a way

as to extract from them constants and constant relations or in such a way as

to place them in continuous variation. We were wrong to give the impres-

sion at times that constants existed alongside variables, linguistic con-

stants alongside variables of enunciation: that was only for convenience of

presentation. For it is obvious that the constants are drawn from the varia-

bles themselves; universals in linguistics have no more existence in them-

selves than they do in economics and are always concluded from a

universalization or a rendering-uniform involving variables. Constant is
not opposed to variable; it is a treatment of the variable opposed to the other

kind of treatment, or continuous variation. So-called obligatory rules cor-

respond to the first kind of treatment, whereas optional rules concern the

construction of a continuum of variation. Moreover, there are a certain

number of categories or distinctions that cannot be invoked, that are inap-

plicable and useless as a basis for objections because they presuppose the

first treatment and are entirely subordinated to the quest for constants: for

example, language as opposed to speech; synchrony as opposed to

diachrony; competence as opposed to performance; distinctive features as

opposed to nondistinctive (or secondarily distinctive) features. For

nondistinctive features, whether prosodic, stylistic, or pragmatic, are not

only omnipresent variables, in contrast to the presence or absence of a con-

stant; they are not only superlinear and "suprasegmental" elements, in

contrast to linear segmental elements; their very characteristics give them

the power to place all the elements of language in a state of continuous

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variation—for example, the impact of tone on phonemes, accent on mor-

phemes, or intonation on syntax. These are not secondary features but

another treatment of language that no longer operates according to the pre-

ceding categories.

"Major" and "minor" do not qualify two different languages but rather

two usages or functions of language. Bilingualism, of course, provides a

good example, but once again we use it simply for the sake of convenience.

Doubtless, in the Austrian empire Czech was a minor language in relation

to German; but the German of Prague already functioned as a potentially

minor language in relation to the German of Vienna or Berlin; and Kafka, a

Czechoslovakian Jew writing in German, submits German to creative

treatment as a minor language, constructing a continuum of variation,

negotiating all of the variables both to constrict the constants and to

expand the variables: make language stammer, or make it "wail," stretch

tensors through all of language, even written language, and draw from it

cries, shouts, pitches, durations, timbres, accents, intensities. Two con-

joined tendencies in so-called minor languages have often been noted: an

impoverishment, a shedding of syntactical and lexical forms; but simulta-

neously a strange proliferation of shifting effects, a taste for overload and

paraphrase. This applies to the German of Prague, Black English, and

Quebecois. But with rare exceptions, the interpretation of the linguists has

been rather malevolent, invoking a consubstantial poverty and preciosity.

The alleged poverty is in fact a restriction of constants and the overload an

extension of variations functioning to deploy a continuum sweeping up all

components. The poverty is not a lack but a void or ellipsis allowing one to

sidestep a constant instead of tackling it head on, or to approach it from

above or below instead of positioning oneself within it. And the overload is

not a rhetorical figure, a metaphor, or symbolic structure; it is a mobile par-

aphrase bearing witness to the unlocalized presence of an indirect dis-

course at the heart of every statement. From both sides we see a rejection of

reference points, a dissolution of constant form in favor of differences in

dynamic. The closer a language gets to this state, the closer it comes not

only to a system of musical notation, but also to music itself.

Subtract and place in variation, remove and place in variation: a single

operation. Minor languages are characterized not by overload and poverty

in relation to a standard or major language, but by a sobriety and variation

that are like a minor treatment of the standard language, a

becoming-minor of the major language. The problem is not the

distinction between major and minor language; it is one of a becoming. It

is a question not of reterritorializing oneself on a dialect or a patois but of

deterritorializing the major language. Black Americans do not oppose

Black to English, they transform the American English that is their own

language into Black

NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS □ 105

English. Minor languages do not exist in themselves: they exist only in rela-

tion to a major language and are also investments of that language for the

purpose of making it minor. One must find the minor language, the dialect

or rather idiolect, on the basis of which one can make one's own major lan-

guage minor. That is the strength of authors termed "minor," who are in

fact the greatest, the only greats: having to conquer one's own language, in

other words, to attain that sobriety in the use of a major language, in order

to place it in a state of continuous variation (the opposite of regionalism). It

is in one's own language that one is bilingual or multilingual. Conquer the

major language in order to delineate in it as yet unknown minor languages.

Use the minor language to send the major language racing. Minor authors

are foreigners in their own tongue. If they are bastards, if they experience

themselves as bastards, it is due not to a mixing or intermingling of lan-

guages but rather to a subtraction and variation of their own language

achieved by stretching tensors through it.

The notion of minority is very complex, with musical, literary, linguis-

tic, as well as juridical and political, references. The opposition between

minority and majority is not simply quantitative. Majority implies a con-

stant, of expression or content, serving as a standard measure by which to

evaluate it. Let us suppose that the constant or standard is the average

adult-white-heterosexual-European-male-speaking a standard language

(Joyce's or Ezra Pound's Ulysses). It is obvious that "man" holds the

majority, even if he is less numerous than mosquitoes, children, women,

blacks, peasants, homosexuals, etc. That is because he appears twice, once

in the constant and again in the variable from which the constant is

extracted. Majority assumes a state of power and domination, not the other

way around. It assumes the standard measure, not the other way around.

Even Marxism "has almost always translated hegemony from the point of

view of the national worker, qualified, male and over thirty-five."

determination different from that of the constant will therefore be consid-

ered minoritarian, by nature and regardless of number, in other words, a

subsystem or an outsystem. This is evident in all the operations, electoral

or otherwise, where you are given a choice, but on the condition that your

choice conform to the limits of the constant ("you mustn't choose to

change society..."). But at this point, everything is reversed. For the

majority, insofar as it is analytically included in the abstract standard, is

never anybody, it is always Nobody—Ulysses—whereas the minority is

the becoming of everybody, one's potential becoming to the extent that one

deviates from the model. There is a majoritarian "fact," but it is the ana-

lytic fact of Nobody, as opposed to the becoming-minoritarian of every-

body. That is why we must distinguish between: the majoritarian as a

constant and homogeneous system; minorities as subsystems; and the

106 □

NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

minoritarian as a potential, creative and created, becoming. The problem

is never to acquire the majority, even in order to install a new constant.

There is no becoming-majoritarian; majority is never becoming. All

becoming is minoritarian. Women, regardless of their numbers, are a

minority, definable as a state or subset; but they create only by making pos-

sible a becoming over which they do not have ownership, into which they

themselves must enter; this is a becoming-woman affecting all of human-

kind, men and women both. The same goes for minor languages: they are

not simply sublanguages, idiolects or dialects, but potential agents of the

major language's entering into a becoming-minoritarian of all of its dimen-

sions and elements. We should distinguish between minor languages, the

major language, and the becoming-minor of the major language. Minori-

ties, of course, are objectively definable states, states of language, ethnicity,

or sex with their own ghetto territorialities, but they must also be thought

of as seeds, crystals of becoming whose value is to trigger uncontrollable

movements and deterritorializations of the mean or majority. That is why

Pasolini demonstrated that the essential thing, precisely in free indirect

discourse, is to be found neither in language A, nor in language B, but "in

language X, which is none other than language A in the actual process of

becoming language B."

There is a universal figure of minoritarian con-

sciousness as the becoming of everybody, and that becoming is creation.

One does not attain it by acquiring the majority. The figure to which we are

referring is continuous variation, as an amplitude that continually over-

steps the representative threshold of the majoritarian standard, by excess

or default. In erecting the figure of a universal minoritarian consciousness,

one addresses powers (puissances) of becoming that belong to a different

realm from that of Power (Pouvoir) and Domination. Continuous variation

constitutes the becoming-minoritarian of everybody, as opposed to the

majoritarian Fact of Nobody. Becoming-minoritarian as the universal fig-

ure of consciousness is called autonomy. It is certainly not by using a minor

language as a dialect, by regionalizing or ghettoizing, that one becomes

revolutionary; rather, by using a number of minority elements, by connect-

ing, conjugating them, one invents a specific, unforeseen, autonomous be-

coming.

The major and minor mode are two different treatments of language,

one of which consists in extracting constants from it, the other in placing it

in continuous variation. The order-word is the variable of enunciation that

effectuates the condition of possibility of language and defines the usage of

its elements according to one of the two treatments; we must therefore

return to it as the only "metalanguage" capable of accounting for this dou-

ble direction, this double treatment of variables. The problem of the func-

tions of language is in general poorly formulated because this order-word

NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS □ 107

variable, which subsumes all possible functions, is overlooked. Following

Canetti's suggestions, we may begin from the following pragmatic situa-

tion: the order-word is a death sentence; it always implies a death sentence,

even if it has been considerably softened, becoming symbolic, initiatory,

temporary, etc. Order-words bring immediate death to those who receive

the order, or potential death if they do not obey, or a death they must them-

selves inflict, take elsewhere. A father's orders to his son, "You will do

this," "You will not do that," cannot be separated from the little death sen-

tence the son experiences on a point of his person. Death, death; it is the

only judgment, and it is what makes judgment a system. The verdict. But
the order-word is also something else, inseparably connected: it is like a

warning cry or a message to flee. It would be oversimplifying to say that

flight is a reaction against the order-word; rather, it is included in it, as its

other face in a complex assemblage, its other component. Canetti is right to

invoke the lion's roar, which enunciates flight and death simultaneously.

The order-word has two tones. The prophet receives order-words just as

much in taking flight as in longing for death: Jewish prophetism fused the

wish to be dead and the flight impulse with the divine order-word.

Now if we consider the first aspect of the order-word, in other words,

death as the expressed of the statement, it clearly meets the preceding

requirements: even though death essentially concerns bodies, is attributed

to bodies, its immediacy, its instantaneousness, lends it the authentic char-

acter of an incorporeal transformation. What precedes and follows it may

be an extensive system of actions and passions, a slow labor of bodies; in

itself, it is neither action nor passion, but a pure act, a pure transformation

that enunciation fuses with the statement, the sentence. That man is dead

... You are already dead when you receive the order-word ... In effect,

death is everywhere, as that ideal, uncrossable boundary separating bod-

ies, their forms, and states, and as the condition, even initiatory, even sym-

bolic, through which a subject must pass in order to change its form or

state. This is the sense in which Canetti speaks of "enantiomorphosis":

regime that involves a hieratic and immutable Master who at every

moment legislates by constants, prohibiting or strictly limiting metamor-

phoses, giving figures clear and stable contours, setting forms in opposi-

tion two by two and requiring subjects to die in order to pass from one form

to the other. It is always by means of something incorporeal that a body sep-

arates and distinguishes itself from another. The figure, insofar as it is the

extremity of a body, is the noncorporeal attribute that limits and completes

that body: death is the Figure. It is through death that a body reaches com-

pletion not only in time but in space, and it is through death that its lines

form or outline a shape. There are dead spaces just as there are dead times.

"If [enantiomorphosis is] practiced often the whole world shrivels....

108 □

NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

Social prohibitions against metamorphosis are perhaps the most impor-

tant of all. . . . Death itself, the strictest of all boundaries, is what is inter-

posed between classes."

In a regime of this kind, any new body requires

the erection of an opposable form, as well as the formation of distinct sub-

jects; death is the general incorporeal transformation attributed to all bod-

ies from the standpoint of their forms and substances (for example, the

body of the Party cannot come into its own without an operation of

enantiomorphosis, and without the formation of new activists, which

assumes the elimination of the first generation).

It is true that we are bringing in considerations of content as well as

expression. For even at the moment when the two planes are most distinct,

as the regime of bodies and the regime of signs in an assemblage, they are

still in reciprocal presupposition. The incorporeal transformation is the

expressed of order-words, but also the attribute of bodies. Not only do lin-

guistic variables of expression enter into relations of formal opposition or

distinction favorable to the extraction of constants; nonlinguistic variables

of content do also. As Hjelmslev notes, an expression is divided, for exam-

ple, into phonic units in the same way a content is divided into social, zoo-

logical, or physical units ("calf divides into young-bovine-male).

The

network of binarities, or arborescences, is applicable to both sides. There

is, however, no analytic resemblance, correspondence, or conformity

between the two planes. But their independence does not preclude isomor-

phism, in other words, the existence of the same kind of constant relations

on both sides. It is by virtue of this type of relations that linguistic and

nonlinguistic elements are inseparable from the start, despite their absence

of correspondence. The elements of content give the interminglings of bod-

ies clear contours at the same time as the elements of expression give the

noncorporeal expresseds a power of sentencing or judgment. These ele-

ments are all abstract or deterritorialized to different degrees, but in each

instance they effect a reterritorialization of the overall assemblage on cer-

tain order-words and contours. Indeed, the significance of the doctrine of

synthetic judgment is to have demonstrated that there is an a priori link

(isomorphism) between Sentence and Figure, form of expression and form

of content.

If we consider the other aspect of the order-word, flight rather than

death, it appears that variables are in a new state, that of continuous varia-

tion. An incorporeal transformation is still attributed to bodies, but it is

now a passage to the limit: that is the only way, not to eliminate death, but

to reduce it or make it a variation itself. This movement pushes language to

its own limits, while bodies are simultaneously caught up in a movement of

metamorphosis of their contents or a process of exhaustion causing them

to reach or overstep the limit of their figures. This is an appropriate place to

NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS □ 109

bring up the opposition between minor sciences and major sciences: for

example, the tendency of the broken line to become a curve, a whole opera-

tive geometry of the trait and movement, a pragmatic science of

placings-in-variation that operates in a different manner than the royal or

major science of Euclid's invariants and travels a long history of

suspicion and even repression (we will return to this question later).

The

smallest interval is always diabolical: the master of metamorphoses is

opposed to the invariant hieratic king. It is as though an intense matter or

a continuum of variation were freed, here in the internal tensors of

language, there in the internal tensions of content. The idea of the

smallest interval does not apply to figures of the same nature; it implies at

least a curve and a straight line, a circle and a tangent. We witness a

transformation of substances and a dissolution of forms, a passage to the

limit or flight from contours in favor of fluid forces, flows, air, light, and

matter, such that a body or a word does not end at a precise point. We

witness the incorporeal power of that intense matter, the material power of

that language. A matter more immediate, more fluid, and more ardent than

bodies or words. In continuous variation the relevant distinction is no

longer between a form of expression and a form of content but between

two inseparable planes in reciprocal presupposition. The relativity of the

distinction between them is now fully realized on the plane of

consistency, where the assemblage is swept up by a now absolute

deterritorialization. Absolute, however, does not mean undifferentiated:

differences, now "infinitely small," are constituted in a single matter

serving both for expression as incorporeal power and for content as

limitless corporeality. The relation of presupposition between variables of

content and expression no longer requires two forms: the

placing-in-variation of the variables instead draws the two forms together

and effects the conjunction of cutting edges of deterritorialization on both

sides; this occurs on the plane of a single liberated matter that contains no

figures, is deliberately unformed, and retains in expression and in content

only those cutting edges, tensors, and tensions. Gestures and things, voices

and sounds, are caught up in the same "opera," swept away by the same

shifting effects of stammering, vibrato, tremolo, and overspilling. A syn-

thesizer places all of the parameters in continuous variation, gradually

making "fundamentally heterogeneous elements end up turning into each

other in some way." The moment this conjunction occurs there is a com-

mon matter. It is only at this point that one reaches the abstract machine, or

the diagram of the assemblage. The synthesizer has replaced judgment,

and matter has replaced the figure or formed substance. It is no longer even

appropriate to group biological, physicochemical, and energetic intensi-

ties on the one hand, and mathematical, aesthetic, linguistic, informa-

tional, semiotic intensities, etc., on the other. The multiplicity of systems

HOD

NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

of intensities conjugates or forms a rhizome throughout the entire assem-

blage the moment the assemblage is swept up by these vectors or tensions of

flight. For the question was not how to elude the order-word but how to

elude the death sentence it envelops, how to develop its power of escape,

how to prevent escape from veering into the imaginary or falling into a

black hole, how to maintain or draw out the revolutionary potentiality of

the order-word. Hofmannsthal adopts the order-word, "Germany, Ger-

many!", or the need to reterritorialize, even in a "melancholy mirror." But

beneath this order-word he hears another, as if the old German "figures"

were mere constants that were then effaced to uncover a relation with

nature and life all the more profound for being variable. When should this

relation to life be a hardening, when submission? At what moment is rebel-

lion called for and at what moment surrender or impassibility? When is dry

speech necessary and when exuberance or amusement?

Whatever the

breaks and ruptures, only continuous variation brings forth this virtual

line, this virtual continuum of life, "the essential element of the real

beneath the everyday." There is a splendid statement in one of Herzog's

films. The main character asks himself a question and then says, Who will

answer this answer? Actually, there is no question, answers are all one ever

answers. To the answer already contained in a question (cross-exam-

ination, competition, plebiscite, etc.) one should respond with questions

from another answer. One should bring forth the order-word of the

order-word. In the order-word, life must answer the answer of death, not by

fleeing, but by making flight act and create. There are pass-words beneath

order-words. Words that pass, words that are components of passage,

whereas order-words mark stoppages or organized, stratified composi-

tions. A single thing or word undoubtedly has this twofold nature: it is nec-

essary to extract one from the other—to transform the compositions of

order into components of passage.

112 □

587 B.c.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS

language. Thus it is the study of the signifying regime that first testifies to

the inadequacy of linguistic presuppositions, and in the very name of

regimes of signs.

There is a simple general formula for the signifying regime of the sign

(the signifying sign): every sign refers to another sign, and only to another

sign, ad infinitum. That is why, at the limit, one can forgo the notion of the

sign, for what is retained is not principally the sign's relation to a state of

things it designates, or to an entity it signifies, but only the formal relation

of sign to sign insofar as it defines a so-called signifying chain. The

limitlessness of signifiance replaces the sign. When denotation (here, des-

ignation and signification taken together) is assumed to be part of connota-

tion, one is wholly within this signifying regime of the sign. Not much

attention is paid to indexes, in other words, the territorial states of things

constituting the designatable. Not much attention is paid to icons, that is,

operations of reterritorialization constituting the signifiable. Thus the sign

has already attained a high degree of relative deterritorialization; it is

thought of as a symbol in a constant movement of referral from sign to sign.

The signifier is the sign in redundancy with the sign. All signs are signs of

signs. The question is not yet what a given sign signifies but to which other

signs it refers, or which signs add themselves to it to form a network with-

out beginning or end that projects its shadow onto an amorphous atmo-

spheric continuum. It is this amorphous continuum that for the moment

plays the role of the "signified," but it continually glides beneath the

signifier, for which it serves only as a medium or wall: the specific forms of

all contents dissolve in it. The atmospherization or mundanization of con-

tents. Contents are abstracted. This is the situation Levi-Strauss describes:

the world begins to signify before anyone knows what it signifies; the signi-

fied is given without being known.

Your wife looked at you with a funny

expression. And this morning the mailman handed you a letter from the

IRS and crossed his fingers. Then you stepped in a pile of dog shit. You saw

two sticks on the sidewalk positioned like the hands of a watch. They were

whispering behind your back when you arrived at the office. It doesn't mat-

ter what it means, it's still signifying. The sign that refers to other signs is

struck with a strange impotence and uncertainty, but mighty is the signifier

that constitutes the chain. The paranoiac shares this impotence of the

deterritorialized sign assailing him from every direction in the gliding

atmosphere, but that only gives him better access to the superpower of the

signifier, through the royal feeling of wrath, as master of the network

spreading through the atmosphere. The paranoid despotic regime: they are

attacking me and making me suffer, but I can guess what they're up to, I'm

one step ahead of them, I've always known, I have power even in my impo-

tence. "I'll get them."

587

B.c.-AD. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS D 113

Nothing is ever over and done with in a regime of this kind. It's made for

that, it's the tragic regime of infinite debt, to which one is simultaneously

debtor and creditor. A sign refers to another sign, into which it passes and

which carries it into still other signs. "To the point that it returns in a circu-

lar fashion ..." Not only do signs form an infinite network, but the net-

work of signs is infinitely circular. The statement survives its object, the

name survives its owner. Whether it passes into other signs or is kept in

reserve for a time, the sign survives both its state of things and its signified;

it leaps like an animal or a dead person to regain its place in the chain and

invest a new state, a new signified, from which it will in turn extricate

itself.

A hint of the eternal return. There is a whole regime of roving, float-

ing statements, suspended names, signs lying in wait to return and be

propelled by the chain. The signifier as the self-redundancy of the

deterri-torialized sign, a funereal world of terror.

But what counts is less this circularity of signs than the multiplicity of

the circles or chains. The sign refers not only to other signs in the same cir-

cle, but to signs in other circles or spirals as well. Robert Lowie describes

how Crow and Hopi men react differently when their wives cheat on them

(the Crow are nomadic hunters and the Hopi sedentaries with an imperial

tradition): "A Crow Indian whose wife has cheated on him slashes her face,

whereas the Hopi who has fallen victim to the same misfortune, without

losing his calm, withdraws and prays for drought and famine to descend on

the village." It is easy to see where the paranoia resides, the despotic ele-

ment or signifying regime, or again, as Levi-Strauss says, "the bigotry": "In

effect, for a Hopi everything is connected: a social disturbance or a domes-

tic incident calls into question the system of the universe, the levels of

which are united by multiple correspondences; a disruption on one plane is

only intelligible, and morally tolerable, as a projection of other disruptions

involving other levels."

The Hopi jump from one circle to another, or from

one sign to another on a different spiral. One leaves the village or the city,

only to return. The jumps may be regulated not only by presignifying ritu-

als but also by a whole imperial bureaucracy passing judgment on their

legitimacy. The jumps are not made at random, they are not without rules.

Not only are they regulated, but some are prohibited: Do not overstep the

outermost circle, do not approach the innermost circle .. . There is a dis-

tinction between circles because, although all signs refer to each other only

to the extent that they are deterritorialized, oriented toward the same cen-

ter of signifiance, distributed throughout an amorphous continuum, they

have different speeds of deterritorialization attesting to a place of origin

(temple, palace, house, street, village, bush, etc.), and they have differential

relations maintaining the distinction between circles or constituting

thresholds in the atmosphere of the continuum (private and public, family

114 □

587 B.c.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS

incident and social disorder). Moreover, the distribution of these thresh-

olds and circles changes according to the case. Deception is fundamental to

the system. Jumping from circle to circle, always moving the scene, playing

it out somewhere else: such is the hysteric operation of the deceiver as sub-

ject, answering to the paranoid operation of the despot installed in his cen-

ter of signifiance.

There is one other aspect: the signifying regime is not simply faced with

the task of organizing into circles signs emitted from every direction; it

must constantly assure the expansion of the circles or spiral, it must pro-

vide the center with more signifier to overcome the entropy inherent in the

system and to make new circles blossom or replenish the old. Thus a secon-

dary mechanism in the service of signifiance is necessary: interpretance or

interpretation. This time the signifier assumes a new figure: it is no longer

the amorphous continuum that is given without being known and across

which the network of signs is strung. A portion of signified is made to corre-

spond to a sign or group of signs for which that signified has been deemed

suitable, thus making it knowable. To the syntagmatic axis of the sign refer-

ring to other signs is added a paradigmatic axis on which the sign, thus for-

malized, fashions for itself a suitable signified (once again there is

abstraction of the content, but in a new way). The interpretive priest, the

seer, is one of the despot-god's bureaucrats. A new aspect of deception

arises, the deception of the priest: interpretation is carried to infinity and

never encounters anything to interpret that is not already itself an interpre-

tation. The signified constantly reimparts signifier, recharges it or pro-

duces more of it. The form always comes from the signifier. The ultimate

signified is therefore the signifier itself, in its redundancy or "excess." It is

perfectly futile to claim to transcend interpretation or even communica-

tion through the production of signifier, because communication and

interpretation are what always serve to reproduce and produce signifier.

That is certainly not the way to revive the notion of production. The dis-

covery of the psychoanalyst-priests (a discovery every kind of priest or seer

made in their time) was that interpretation had to be subordinated to

signifiance, to the point that the signifier would impart no signified with-

out the signified reimparting signifier in its turn. Actually, there is no

longer even any need to interpret, but that is because the best interpreta-

tion, the weightiest and most radical one, is an eminently significant

silence. It is well known that although psychoanalysts have ceased to speak,

they interpret even more, or better yet, fuel interpretation on the part of the

subject, who jumps from one circle of hell to the next. In truth, signifiance

and interpretosis are the two diseases of the earth or the skin, in other

words, humankind's fundamental neurosis.

There is not much to say about the center of signifiance, or the Signifier

587

B.c.-AD. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS □ 115

in person, because it is a pure abstraction no less than a pure principle; in

other words, it is nothing. Lack or excess, it hardly matters. It comes to the

same thing to say that the sign refers to other signs ad infinitum and that the

infinite set of all signs refers to a supreme signifier. At any rate, this pure

formal redundancy of the signifier could not even be conceptualized if it

did not have its own substance of expression, for which we must find a

name: faciality. Not only is language always accompanied by faciality

traits, but the face crystallizes all redundancies, it emits and receives,

releases and recaptures signifying signs. It is a whole body unto itself: it is

like the body of the center of signifiance to which all of the deterritorialized

signs affix themselves, and it marks the limit of their deterritorialization.

The voice emanates from the face; that is why, however fundamentally

important the writing machine is in the imperial bureaucracy, what is writ-

ten retains an oral or nonbook character. The face is the Icon proper to the

signifying regime, the reterritorialization internal to the system. The

signifier reterritorializes on the face. The face is what gives the signifier

substance; it is what fuels interpretation, and it is what changes, changes

traits, when interpretation reimparts signifier to its substance. Look, his

expression changed. The signifier is always facialized. Faciality reigns

materially over that whole constellation of signifiances and interpretations

(psychologists have written extensively on the baby's relations to the moth-

er's face, and sociologists on the role of the face in mass media and adver-

tising). The despot-god has never hidden his face, far from it: he makes

himself one, or even several. The mask does not hide the face, it is the face.

The priest administers the face of the god. With the despot, everything is

public, and everything that is public is so by virtue of the face. Lies and

deception may be a fundamental part of the signifying regime, but secrecy

is not.

Conversely, when the face is effaced, when the faciality traits dis-

appear, we can be sure that we have entered another regime, other zones

infinitely muter and more imperceptible where subterranean

becomings-animal occur, becomings-molecular, nocturnal

deterritorializations over-spilling the limits of the signifying system. The

despot or god brandishes the solar face that is his entire body, as the body

of the signifier. He looked at me queerly, he knitted his brow, what did I

do to make him change expression? I have her picture in front of me, it's as

if she were watching me ... Surveillance by the face, as Strindberg said.

Overcoding by the signifier, irradiation in all directions, unlocalized

omnipresence.

Finally, the face or body of the despot or god has something like a

counterbody: the body of the tortured, or better, of the excluded. There is

no question that these two bodies communicate, for the body of the despot

is sometimes subjected to trials of humiliation or even torture, or of exile

and exclusion. "At the opposite pole one might imagine placing the body of

16 □ 587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS

the condemned man; he, too, has his legal status; he gives rise to his own

ceremonial... not in order to ground the surplus power possessed by the

person of the sovereign, but in order to code the lack of power with which

those subjected to punishment are marked. In the darkest region of the

political field the condemned man outlines the symmetrical, inverted fig-

ure of the king."

The one who is tortured is fundamentally one who loses

his or her face, entering into a becoming-animal, a becoming-molecular the

ashes of which are thrown to the wind. But it appears that the one who is

tortured is not at all the final term, but rather the first step before exclu-

sion. Oedipus, at least, understood that. He tortured himself, gouged out

his own eyes, then went away. The rite, the becoming-animal of the scape-

goat clearly illustrates this: a first expiatory animal is sacrificed, but a sec-

ond is driven away, sent out into the desert wilderness. In the signifying

regime, the scapegoat represents a new form of increasing entropy in the

system of signs: it is charged with everything that was "bad" in a given

period, that is, everything that resisted signifying signs, everything that

eluded the referral from sign to sign through the different circles; it also

assumes everything that was unable to recharge the signifier at its center

and carries off everything that spills beyond the outermost circle. Finally,

and especially, it incarnates that line of flight the signifying regime cannot

tolerate, in other words, an absolute deterritorialization; the regime must

block a line of this kind or define it in an entirely negative fashion precisely

because it exceeds the degree of deterritorialization of the signifying sign,

however high it may be. The line of flight is like a tangent to the circles of

signifiance and the center of the signifier. It is under a curse. The goat's

anus stands opposite the face of the despot or god. Anything that threatens

to put the system to flight will be killed or put to flight itself. Anything that

exceeds the excess of the signifier or passes beneath it will be marked with a

negative value. Your only choice will be between a goat's ass and the face of

the god, between sorcerers and priests. The complete system, then, consists

of the paranoid face or body of the despot-god in the signifying center of the

temple; the interpreting priests who continually recharge the signified in

the temple, transforming it into signifier; the hysterical crowd of people

outside, clumped in tight circles, who jump from one circle to another; the

faceless, depressive scapegoat emanating from the center, chosen, treated,

and adorned by the priests, cutting across the circles in its headlong flight

into the desert. This excessively hasty overview is applicable not only to the

imperial despotic regime but to all subjected, arborescent, hierarchical,

centered groups: political parties, literary movements, psychoanalytic

associations, families, conjugal units, etc. The photo, faciality, redun-

dancy, signifiance, and interpretation are at work everywhere. The dreary

world of the signifier; its archaism with an always contemporary function;

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B.c.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS □ 117

its essential deception, connoting all of its aspects; its profound antics.

The signifier reigns over every domestic squabble, and in every State

apparatus.

The signifying regime of the sign is defined by eight aspects or princi-

ples: (1) the sign refers to another sign, ad infinitum (the limitlessness of

signifiance, which deterritorializes the sign); (2) the sign is brought back by

other signs and never ceases to return (the circularity of the

deterrito-rialized sign); (3) the sign jumps from circle to circle and

constantly displaces the center at the same time as it ties into it (the

metaphor or hysteria of signs); (4) the expansion of the circles is assured by

interpretations that impart signified and reimpart signifier (the

interpretosis of the priest); (5) the infinite set of signs refers to a supreme

signifier presenting itself as both lack and excess (the despotic signifier, the

limit of the system's deterrito-rialization); (6) the form of the signifier has a

substance, or the signifier has a body, namely, the Face (the principle of

faciality traits, which constitute a reterritorialization); (7) the system's line

of flight is assigned a negative value, condemned as that which exceeds

the signifying regime's power of deterritorialization (the principle of the

scapegoat); (8) the regime is one of universal deception, in its jumps, in the

regulated circles, in the seer's regulation of interpretations, in the

publicness of the facialized center, and in the treatment of the line of

flight.

Not only is this semiotic system not the first, but we see no reason to

accord it any particular privilege from the standpoint of an abstract evolu-

tionism. We would like to indicate very briefly certain characteristics of the

other two semiotic systems. First, the so-called primitive, presignifying
semiotic, which is much closer to "natural" codings operating without

signs. There is no reduction to faciality as the sole substance of expression:

there is no elimination of forms of content through abstraction of the signi-

fied. To the extent that there is still abstraction of content from a strictly

semiotic point of view, it fosters a pluralism or polyvocality of forms of

expression that prevents any power takeover by the signifier and preserves

expressive forms particular to content; thus forms of corporeality,

gesturality, rhythm, dance, and rite coexist heterogeneously with the vocal

form.

A variety of forms and substances of expression intersect and form

relays. It is a segmentary but plurilinear, multidimensional semiotic that

wards off any kind of signifying circularity. Segmentarity is the law of the

lineages. Here, the sign owes its degree of relative deterritorialization not

to a perpetual referral to other signs but rather to a confrontation between

the territorialities and compared segments from which each sign is

extracted (the camp, the bush, the moving of the camp). Not only is the

polyvocality of statements preserved, but it is possible to finish with a

statement: A name that has been used up is abolished, a situation quite

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unlike the placing in reserve or transformation occurring in the signifying

semiotic. The meaning of cannibalism in a presignifying regime is pre-

cisely this: eating the name, a semiography that is fully a part of a semiotic

in spite of its relation to content (the relation is an expressive one).

should not be thought that a semiotic of this kind functions by ignorance,

repression, or foreclosure of the signifier. On the contrary, it is animated by

a keen presentiment of what is to come. It does not need to understand it to

fight against it. It is wholly destined by its very segmentarity and

poly-vocality to avert the already-present threat: universalizing

abstraction, erection of the signifier, circularity of statements, and their

correlates, the State apparatus, the instatement of the despot, the priestly

caste, the scapegoat, etc. Every time they eat a dead man, they can say: one

more the State won't get.

There is another semiotic, the countersignifying semiotic (whose most

notable representatives are the fearsome, warlike, and animal-raising

nomads, as opposed to hunter nomads, who belong to the previous

semiotic). This time, the semiotic proceeds less by segmentarity than by

arithmetic and numeration. Of course, the number already played a role of

great importance in the division and union of segmentary lineages; it also

had a function of decisive importance in the signifying imperial bureau-

cracy. But that was a kind of number that represented or signified, a num-

ber "incited, produced, caused by something other than itself." On the

contrary, a numerical sign that is not produced by something outside the

system of marking it institutes, which marks a mobile and plural distribu-

tion, which itself determines functions and relations, which arrives at

arrangements rather than totals, distributions rather than collections,

which operates more by breaks, transitions, migration, and accumulation

than by combining units—a sign of this kind would appear to belong to the

semiotic of a nomad war machine directed against the State apparatus. The

numbering number.

Its numerical organization into tens, fifties, hun-

dreds, thousands, etc., and the associated spatial organization were obvi-

ously adopted by State armies, but basically bear witness to a military

system specific to the great nomads of the steppes, from the Hyksos to the

Mongols. They were superposed upon the principle of lineage. Secrecy and

spying are important elements of the war machine's semiotic of Numbers.

The role of Numbers in the Bible is not unrelated to the nomads, since

Moses got the idea from his father-in-law, Jethro the Kenite: he used it as an

organizational principle for the march and migration, and applied it him-

self to the military domain. In this countersignifying regime, the imperial

despotic line of flight is replaced by a line of abolition that turns back

against the great empires, cuts across them and destroys them, or else con-

quers them and integrates with them to form a mixed semiotic.

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B.c.-AD. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS D 119

We would like to go into greater detail on a fourth regime of signs, the

postsignifying regime, which has different characteristics opposing it to

signifiance and is defined by a unique procedure, that of

"subjecti-fication."

There are many regimes of signs. Our own list is arbitrarily limited.

There is no reason to identify a regime or a semiotic system with a people

or historical moment. There is such mixture within the same period or the

same people that we can say no more than that a given people, language,

or period assures the relative dominance of a certain regime. Perhaps all

semiotics are mixed and not only combine with various forms of content

but also combine different regimes of signs. Presignifying elements are

always active in the signifying regime; countersignifying elements are

always present and at work within it; and postsignifying elements are

already there. Even that is to mark too much temporality. The semiotics

and their mixtures may appear in a history of confrontation and inter-

mingling of peoples, but also in languages in which there are several com-

peting functions, or in a psychiatric hospital in which different forms of

insanity coexist among the patients or even combine in a single patient; or

in an ordinary conversation in which people are speaking the same

tongue but different languages (all of a sudden a fragment of an unex-

pected semiotic surfaces). We are not suggesting an evolutionism, we are

not even doing history. Semiotic systems depend on assemblages, and it is

the assemblages that determine that a given people, period, or language,

and even a given style, fashion, pathology, or minuscule event in a limited

situation, can assure the predominance of one semiotic or another. We

are trying to make maps of regimes of signs: we can turn them around or

retain selected coordinates or dimensions, and depending on the case we

will be dealing with a social formation, a pathological delusion (d'elire), a

historical event, etc. We will see this on another occasion when we deal

with a dated social system, "courtly love," and then switch to a private

enterprise called "masochism." We can also combine maps or separate

them. To make the distinction between two types of semiotics (for exam-

ple, the postsignifying regime and the signifying regime), we must con-

sider very diverse domains simultaneously.

In the first years of the twentieth century, psychiatry, at the height of its

clinical skills, confronted the problem of nonhallucinatory delusions in

which mental integrity is retained without "intellectual diminishment."

There was a first major grouping, paranoid or interpretive delusions,

which already subsumed various aspects. But the question of the possible

independence of another group was prefigured in Esquirol's monomania

and Kraepelin's querulous delusion, and later defined by Serieux and

Capgras as grievance delusion, and by Clerambault as passional delusion

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("querulousness or seeking redress, jealousy, erotomania"). Basing our-

selves on very fine studies of Serieux and Capgras on the one hand, and

Clerambault on the other (the latter took the distinction furthest), we will

contrast a paranoid-interpretive ideal regime of signifiance with a

passional, postsignifying subjective regime. The first regime is defined by

an insidious onset and a hidden center bearing witness to endogenous

forces organized around an idea; by the development of a network stretch-

ing across an amorphous continuum, a gliding atmosphere into which the

slightest incident may be carried; by an organization of radiating circles

expanding by circular irradiation in all directions, and in which the indi-

vidual jumps from one point to another, one circle to another, approaches

the center then moves away, operates prospectively and retrospectively;

and by a transformation of the atmosphere, as a function of variable traits

or secondary centers clustered around a principal nucleus. The second

regime, on the contrary, is defined by a decisive external occurrence, by a

relation with the outside that is expressed more as an emotion than an idea,

and more as effort or action than imagination ("active delusion rather than

ideational delusion"); by a limited constellation operating in a single sec-

tor; by a "postulate" or "concise formula" serving as the point of departure

for a linear series or proceeding that runs its course, at which point a new

proceeding begins. In short, it operates by the linear and temporal succes-
sion of finite proceedings, rather than by the simultaneity of circles in unlim-
ited expansion.

This story of two kinds of delusions without intellectual diminishment

is of great importance. For it is not a disruption of a preexisting discipline

of psychiatry; it lies at the heart of the constitution of the psychiatrist in the

nineteenth century and explains why he or she was from the start what he

or she has been ever since: the psychiatrist was born cornered, caught

between legal, police, humanitarian demands, accused of not being a true

doctor, suspected of mistaking the sane for mad and the mad for sane, prey

to quandaries of conscience, the last Hegelian belle ame. If we consider the

two types of intact delusions, we can say that people in the first group seem

to be completely mad, but aren't: President Schreber developed his radiat-

ing paranoia and relations with God in every direction, but he was not mad

in that he remained capable of managing his wealth wisely and distinguish-

ing between circles. At the other pole are those who do not seem mad in any

way, but are, as borne out by their sudden actions, such as quarrels, arsons,

murders (Esquirol's four great monomanias, erotic, intellectual, arson,

and homocidal, already belong in this category). In short, psychiatry was

not at all constituted in relation to the concept of madness, or even as a

modification of that concept, but rather by its split in these two opposite
directions. And is it not our own double image, all of ours, that psychiatry

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B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS □ 121

thus reveals: seeming mad withoutt>eing it, then being it without seeming

it? (This twofold assertion is also psychoanalysis's point of departure, its

way of linking into psychiatry: we seem to be mad but aren't, observe the

dream; we are mad but don't seem to be, observe everyday life.) Thus psy-

chiatrists were alternately in the position of on the one hand pleading for

tolerance and understanding, underscoring the uselessness of confine-

ment, appealing for open-door asylums; and on the other arguing for

stepped-up surveillance and special high-security asylums, stricter mea-

sures necessitated by the fact that the mad seemed not to be.

Is it by

chance that the distinction between the two major kinds of delusions, idea-

tional and active, in many ways recapitulates the distinction between the

classes (paranoiacs do not particularly need to be committed, they are usu-

ally bourgeois, whereas monomaniacs, passional redress-seekers, are most

often from the working and rural classes, or are marginal, as in the case of

political assassins).'' A class with radiant, irradiating ideas (but of course!)

against a class reduced to linear, sporadic, partial, local actions ... All par-

anoiacs are not bourgeois, all passionals or monomaniacs are not proletar-

ian. But God and his psychiatrists are charged with recognizing, among

these de facto mixes, those who preserve, even in delusion, the class-based

social order, and those who sow disorder, even strictly localized, such as

haystack fires, parental murders, declasse love and aggression.

We are trying, then, to make a distinction between a paranoid, signify-

ing, despotic regime of signs and a passional or subjective, postsignifying,

authoritarian regime. Authoritarian is assuredly not the same as despotic,

passional is not the same as paranoid, and subjective is not the same as sig-

nifying. What happens in the second regime, by comparison with the signi-

fying regime as we have already defined it? In the first place, a sign or
packet of signs detaches from the irradiating circular network and sets to

work on its own account, starts running a straight line, as though swept into

a narrow, open passage. Already the signifying system drew a line of flight

or deterritorialization exceeding the specific index of its deterritorialized

signs, but the system gave that line a negative value and sent the scapegoat

fleeing down it. Here, it seems that the line receives a positive sign, as

though it were effectively occupied and followed by a people who find in it

their reason for being or destiny. Once again, we are not, of course, doing

history: we are not saying that a people invents this regime of signs, only

that at a given moment a people effectuates the assemblage that assures the

relative dominance of that regime under certain historical conditions (and

that regime, that dominance, that assemblage may be assured under other

conditions, for example, pathological, literary, romantic, or entirely mun-

dane). We are not saying that a people is possessed by a given type of

delusion but that the map of a delusion, its coordinates considered, may

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coincide with the map of a people, its coordinates considered. The para-

noid Pharaoh and the passional Hebrew? In the case of the Jewish people, a

group of signs detaches from the Egyptian imperial network of which it was

a part and sets off down a line of flight into the desert, pitting the most

authoritarian of subjectivities against despotic signifiance, the most

passional and least interpretive of delusions against interpretational

paranoid delusion, in short, a linear "proceeding and grievance" against

the irradiating circular network. Your grievance, your proceeding: that is

Moses' word to his people, and the proceedings come one after the other

along a line of Passion.

From this Kafka derives his own conception of

querulousness or the proceeding, and the succession of linear segments:

the father-proceeding, hotel-proceeding, ship-proceeding, court-pro-

ceeding . ..

We cannot overlook the most fundamental or extensive event in the his-

tory of the Jewish people: the destruction of the Temple, in two stages (587

B.C. and A.D. 70). The whole history of the Temple—the mobility and fra-

gility of the ark, then the construction of a House by Solomon, its recon-

struction under Darius, etc.—has meaning only in relation to renewed

proceedings of destruction, the two supreme moments of which came with

Nebuchadnezzar and Titus. A temple, mobile, fragile, or destroyed: the ark

is no more than a little portable packet of signs. An entirely negative line of

flight occupied by the animal or scapegoat laden with all the dangers

threatening the signifier has become an impossibility. Let misfortune

befall us: this formula punctuates Jewish history. It is we who must follow

the most deterritorialized line, the line of the scapegoat, but we will change

its sign, we will turn it into the positive line of our subjectivity, our Passion,

our proceeding or grievance. We will be our own scapegoat. We will be the

lamb: "The God who, like a lion, was given blood sacrifice must be shoved

into the background, and the sacrificed god must occupy the foreground.

... God became the animal that was slain, instead of the animal that does

the slaying."

We will follow, we will wed the tangent separating the land

from the waters, we will separate the circular network from the gliding

continuum, we will make the line of separation our own, in order to forge

our path along it and dissociate the elements of the signifier (the dove of the

ark). A narrow line of march, an in-between that is not a mean but a

slender line. There is a Jewish specificity, immediately affirmed in a

semiotic system. This semiotic, however, is no less mixed than any other.

On the one hand, it is intimately related to the countersignifying regime of

the nomads (the Hebrews had a nomadic past, a continuing relationship

with the nomadic numerical organization that inspired them, and their

own particular becoming-nomad; their line of deterritorialization owed

much to the military line of nomadic destruction).

On the other hand, it

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B.c.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS □ 123

has an essential relation to the signifying semiotic itself, for which the

Hebrews and their God would always be nostalgic: reestablish an imperial

society and integrate with it, enthrone a king like everybody else (Samuel),

rebuild a temple that would finally be solid (David and Solomon,

Zachariah), erect the spiral of the Tower of Babel and find the face of God

again; not just bring the wandering to a halt, but overcome the diaspora,

which itself exists only as a function of an ideal regathering. We only have

space to indicate what, in this mixed semiotic, bears witness to the new

postsignifying subjective or passional regime.

Faciality undergoes a profound transformation. The god averts his face,

which must be seen by no one; and the subject, gripped by a veritable fear of

the god, averts his or her face in turn. The averted faces, in profile, replace

the frontal view of the radiant face. It is this double turning away that draws

the positive line of flight. The prophet is the main figure in this assemblage;

he needs a sign to guarantee the word of God, he is himself marked by a sign

indicating the special regime to which he belongs. It is Spinoza who has

elaborated the profoundest theory of prophetism, taking into account the

semiotic proper to it. Cain, who turns away from the God who turns away

from him, already follows the line of deterritorialization, protected by a

sign allowing him to escape death. The mark of Cain. A punishment worse

than imperial death? The Jewish God invented the reprieve, existence in

reprieve, indefinite postponement.

But He also invented the positivity of

alliance, or the covenant, as the new relation with the deity, since the sub-

ject remains alive. Abel, whose name is vanity, is nothing; Cain is the true

man. This is very different from the system of rigging or deception animat-

ing the face of the signifier, the interpretation of the seer and the displace-

ments of the subject. It is the regime of betrayal, universal betrayal, in

which the true man never ceases to betray God just as God betrays man,

with the wrath of God defining the new positivity. Before his death, Moses

receives the words of the great song of betrayal. Even the prophet, unlike

the seer-priest, is fundamentally a traitor and thus fulfills God's order bet-

ter than anyone who remained faithful could. God calls upon Jonah to go to

Nineveh to entreat the inhabitants, who had repeatedly betrayed God, to

mend their ways. But Jonah's first act is to take off in the opposite direc-

tion; he also betrays God, fleeing "far from the face of Adonai."

He takes a

ship for Tarshish and sleeps, like a righteous man. The tempest sent by

God causes him to be thrown into the sea, where he is swallowed by the

great fish and vomited out at the boundary between land and water, the

limit of separation or line of flight earlier occupied by the dove of the Ark

(Jonah, precisely, is the word for dove). But Jonah, in fleeing from the face

of God, did exactly what God had wanted: he took the evil of Nineveh

upon himself; he did it even more effectively than God had wanted, he

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anticipated God. That is why he slept like a righteous man. God let him

live, temporarily protected by the tree of Cain, but then made the tree die

because Jonah had renewed the covenant by occupying the line of flight.

Jesus universalizes the system of betrayal: he betrays the God of the Jews,

he betrays the Jews, he is betrayed by God ("Why hast thou forsaken me?"

[Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34—Trans.]), he is betrayed by Judas, the true

man. He took evil upon himself, but the Jews who kill him also take it upon

themselves. Jesus is asked for a sign of his divine descendance: he invokes

the sign of Jonah [Luke 11:29—Trans.]. Cain, Jonah, and Jesus constitute

three great linear proceedings along which signs rush and form relays.

There are many others. Everywhere a double turning away on a line of

flight.

When a prophet declines the burden God entrusts to him (Moses,

Jeremiah, Isaiah, etc.), it is not because the burden would have been too

heavy, as with an imperial oracle or seer who refuses a dangerous mission.

It is instead a case like Jonah's, who by hiding and fleeing and betraying

anticipates the will of God more effectively than if he had obeyed. The

prophet is always being forced by God, literally violated by him, much

more than inspired by him. The prophet is not a priest. The prophet does

not know how to talk, God puts the words in his mouth: word-ingestion, a

new form of semiophagy. Unlike the seer, the prophet interprets nothing:
his delusion is active rather than ideational or imaginative, his relation to

God is passional and authoritative rather than despotic and signifying; he

anticipates and detects the powers {puissances) of the future rather than

applying past and present powers (pouvoirs). Faciality traits no longer func-

tion to prevent the formation of a line of flight, or to form a body of

signifiance controlling that line and sending only a faceless goat down it.

Rather, it is faciality itself that organizes the line of flight, in the face-off

between two countenances that become gaunt and turn away in profile.

Betrayal has become an idee fixe, the main obsession, replacing the deceit

of the paranoiac and the hysteric. The "persecutor-persecuted" relation

has no relevance whatsoever: its meaning is altogether different in the

authoritarian passional regime than in the despotic paranoid regime.

Something is still bothering us: the story of Oedipus. Oedipus is almost

unique in the Greek world. The whole first part is imperial, despotic, para-

noid, interpretive, divinatory. But the whole second part is Oedipus's wan-

dering, his line of flight, the double turning away of his own face and that of

God. Rather than very precise limits to be crossed in order, or which one

does not have the right to cross (hybris), there is a concealed limit toward

which Oedipus is swept. Rather than interpretive signifying irradiation,

there is a subjective linear proceeding permitting Oedipus to keep a secret,

but only as a residue capable of starting a new linear proceeding. Oedipus,

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his name is atheos: he invents something worse than death or exile, he wan-

ders and survives on a strangely positive line of separation or

deterri-torialization. Holderlin and Heidegger see this as the birth of the
double turning away, the change of face, and also the birth of modern

tragedy, for which they bizarrely credit the Greeks: the outcome is no

longer murder or sudden death but survival under reprieve, unlimited

postponement.

Nietzsche suggests that Oedipus, as opposed to

Prometheus, was the Semitic myth of the Greeks, the glorification of

Passion or passivity.'

Oedipus: Greek Cain. Let us return to

psychoanalysis. It was not by chance that Freud pounced upon Oedipus.

Psychoanalysis is a definite case of a mixed semiotic: a despotic regime

of signifiance and interpretation, with irradiation of the face, but also an

authoritarian regime of subjectification and prophetism, with a turning

away of the face (the positioning of the psychoanalyst behind the patient

suddenly assumes its full significance). Recent efforts to explain that a

"signifier represents the subject for another signifier" are typically

syncretic: a linear proceeding of subjectivity along with a circular

development of the signifier and interpretation. Two absolutely different

regimes of signs in a mix. But the worst, most underhanded of powers are

founded on it.

One more remark on the story of authoritarian passional betrayal, as

opposed to despotic paranoid deception. Everything is infamy, but Borges

botched his history of universal infamy.

He should have distinguished

between the great realm of deceptions and the great realm of betrayals. And

also between the various figures of betrayal. There is, in effect, a second fig-

ure of betrayal that springs up at certain places at certain times, but always

as a function of a variable assemblage with new components. Christianity

is a particularly important case of a mixed semiotic, with its signifying

imperial combination together with its postsignifying Jewish subjectivity.

It transforms both the ideal signifying system and the postsignifying

passional system. It invents a new assemblage. Heresies are still a part of

deception, just as orthodoxy is a part of signifiance. But there are heresies

that are more than heresies and profess pure treason, for example, the

Buggers; it is not by chance that the Bulgars played a special role.

Beware

the Bulgars, as Monsieur Plume would say. The problem is one of territori-

alities in relation to deep movements of deterritorialization. England,

another territoriality or another deterritorialization: Cromwell, every-

where a traitor, a straight line of passional subjectification opposed to the

royal center of signifiance and the intermediary circles: the dictator against

the despot. Richard III, the deformed, the twisted, whose ideal is to betray

everything: he confronts Lady Anne in a face-off in which the two counte-

nances turn away, but each knows she or he is the other's, destined for the

other. This is unlike Shakespeare's other historical dramas, in which kings

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and assassins deceive in order to take power but then become good kings.

That kind are men of the State. Richard III comes from elsewhere: his ven-

tures, including those with women, derive more from a war machine than

from a State apparatus. He is the traitor, springing from the great nomads

and their secrecy. He says so from the beginning, when he mentions a secret

project infinitely surpassing the conquest of power. He wants to return the

war machine both to the fragile State and pacified couples. The only one to

guess is Lady Anne, fascinated, terrified, consenting. Elizabethan theater

is full of these traitorous characters who aspire to be absolute traitors, in

opposition to the deceptions of the man of the court or even of the State.

How many betrayals accompanied the great discoveries of Christen-

dom, the discovery of new lands and continents! Lines of

deterrito-rialization on which small groups betray everything, their

companions, the king, the indigenous peoples, the neighboring explorer, in

the mad hope of founding, with a woman of their family, a race that

would finally be pure and represent a new beginning. Herzog's film,
Aguirre, is very Shakespearean. Aguirre asks, How can one be a traitor

everywhere and in everything? I'm the only traitor here. No more

deception, it's time for betrayal. What a grandiose dream! I will be the last

traitor, the total traitor, and therefore the last man.

Then there was the Reformation: the extraordinary figure of Luther, as

traitor to all things and all people; his personal relation with the Devil

resulting in betrayal, through good deeds as well as bad.

These new figures of betrayal always return to the Old Testament: I am

the wrath of God. But betrayal has become humanist, it does not fall

between God and his own men; it relies on God, but falls between the men

of God and the others, denounced as deceivers. In the end, there is only one

man of God or of the wrath of God, a single betrayer against all deceivers.

But every deceiver is mixed, and which does not take him- or herself to be

the one? And what betrayer does not say to him- or herself at some point

that he or she was nothing but a deceiver after all? (See the strange case of

Maurice Sachs.)

It is clear that the book, or what takes its place, has a different meaning

in the signifying paranoid regime than in the postsignifying passional

regime. In the first case, there is an emission of the despotic signifier, and

its interpretation by scribes and priests, which fixes the signified and

reimparts signifier; but there is also, from sign to sign, a movement from

one territory to another, a circulation assuring a certain speed of

deterritorialization (for example, the circulation of an epic, or the rivalry

between several cities for the birth of a hero, or, once again, the role of

scribe-priests in exchanges of territorialities and genealogies).

What

takes the place of the book always has an external model, a referent, face,

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B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS □ 127

family, or territory that preserves the book's oral character. On the con-

trary, in the passional regime the book seems to be internalized, and to

internalize everything: it becomes the sacred written Book. It takes the

place of the face and God, who hides his face and gives Moses the inscribed

stone tablets. God manifests himself through trumpets and the Voice, but

what is heard in sound is the nonface, just as what is seen in the book are

words. The book has become the body of passion, just as the face was the

body of the signifier. It is now the book, the most deterritorialized of

things, that fixes territories and genealogies. The latter are what the book

says, and the former the place at which the book is said. The function of

interpretation has totally changed. Or it disappears entirely in favor of a

pure and literal recitation forbidding the slightest change, addition, or

commentary (the famous "stultify yourself of the Christians belongs to

this passional line; the Koran goes the furthest in this direction). Or else

interpretation survives but becomes internal to the book itself, which loses

its circulatory function for outside elements: for example, the different

types of coded interpretation are fixed according to axes internal to the

book; interpretation is organized according to correspondences between

two books, such as the Old and New Testaments, and may even induce a

third book suffused by the same element of interiority.

Finally, interpre-

tation may reject all intermediaries or specialists and become direct, since

the book is written both in itself and in the heart, once as a point of

subjectification and again in the subject (the Reformation conception of

the book). In any case, this is the point of departure for the delusional pas-

sion of the book as origin and finality of the world. The unique book, the

total work, all possible combinations inside the book, the tree-book, the

cosmos-book: all of these platitudes so dear to the avant-gardes, which cut

the book off from its relations with the outside, are even worse than the

chant of the signifier. Of course, they are entirely bound up with a mixed

semiotic. But in truth they have a particularly pious origin. Wagner,

Mallarme, and Joyce, Marx and Freud: still Bibles. If passional delusion is

profoundly monomaniacal, monomania for its part found a fundamental

element of its assemblage in monotheism and the Book. The strangest cult.

This is how things are in the passional regime, or the regime of

subjectification. There is no longer a center of signifiance connected to

expanding circles or an expanding spiral, but a point of subjectification

constituting the point of departure of the line. There is no longer a

signifier-signified relation, but a subject of enunciation issuing from the

point of subjectification and a subject of the statement in a determinable

relation to the first subject. There is no longer sign-to-sign circularity, but a

linear proceeding into which the sign is swept via subjects. We may con-

sider these three diverse realms.

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1. The Jews as opposed to the empires. God withdraws his face, becom-

ing a point of subjectification for the drawing of a line of flight or

deterritorialization; Moses is the subject of enunciation, constituted on the

basis of the tablets of God that replace the face; the Jewish people consti-

tute the subject of the statement, for betrayal as well as for a new land, and

enter an ever-renewed covenant or linear "proceeding" rather than a circu-

lar expansion.

2. So-called modern, or Christian, philosophy: Descartes as opposed to

ancient philosophy. There is a primacy of the idea of the infinite as an

absolutely necessary point of subjectification. The Cogito, consciousness,

the "I think" is the subject of enunciation that reflects its own use and

conceives of itself following a line of deterritorialization represented by

methodical doubt. The subject of the statement is the union of the soul and

the body, or feeling, guaranteed in a complex way by the cogito, and per-

forms the necessary reterritorializations. The cogito is a proceeding that

must always be recommenced, haunted by the possibility of betrayal, a

deceitful God, and an evil Genius. When Descartes says, I can infer "I

think therefore I am" but not "I walk therefore I am," he is initiating the

distinction between the two subjects (what still-Cartesian contemporary

linguists call a shifter, even though they find traces of the second subject in

the first).

3. Nineteenth-century psychiatry: monomania distinguished from

mania; subjective delusion separated from ideational delusions; "posses-

sion" replacing sorcery; a slow elaboration of passional delusion, as dis-

tinct from paranoia ... The schema of passional delusion according to

Clerambault is as follows: the Postulate as the point of subjectification
(He loves me); pride as the tonality of the subject of enunciation (de-

lusional pursuit of the loved one); Spite, Rancor (a result of a reversion to

the subject of the statement). Passional delusion is a veritable cogito. In the

foregoing example of erotomania, as well as in jealousy and querulous

delusion, Clerambault stresses that a sign must follow a segment or linear

proceeding through to the end before it can begin another, whereas the

signs in paranoid delusion form an endless, self-adjusting network devel-

oping in all directions. The cogito also follows a linear temporal proceed-

ing needing to be recommenced. The history of the Jews is punctuated by

catastrophes after each of which there were just enough survivors to start

a new proceeding. In the course of a proceeding, while there is linear

movement the plural is often used, whereas there is a return to the Singu-

lar as soon as there is a pause or stoppage marking the end of one move-

ment before another begins.

Fundamental segmentarity: one proceeding

must end (and its termination must be marked) before another begins, to

enable another to begin.

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B.c.-AD. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS □ 129

The point of subj edification is the origin of the passional line of the

postsignifying regime. The point of subjectification can be anything. It

must only display the following characteristic traits of the subjective

semiotic: the double turning away, betrayal, and existence under reprieve.

For anorexics, food plays this role (anorexics do not confront death but

save themselves by betraying food, which is equally a traitor since it is sus-

pected of containing larvae, worms, and microbes). A dress, an article of

underwear, a shoe are points of subjectification for a fetishist. So is a

faciality trait for someone in love, but the meaning of faciality has

changed; it is no longer the body of the signifier but has become the point

of departure for a deterritorialization that puts everything else to flight. A

thing, an animal, will do the trick. There are cogitos on everything. "A

pair of eyes set far apart, a head hewn of quartz, a haunch that seemed to

live its own life.... Whenever the beauty of the female becomes irresisti-

ble, it is traceable to a single quality":

a point of subjectification in the

departure of a passional line. Moreover, several points coexist in a given

individual or group, which are always engaged in several distinct and not

always compatible linear proceedings. The various forms of education or

"normalization" imposed upon an individual consist in making him or her

change points of subjectification, always moving toward a higher, nobler

one in closer conformity with the supposed ideal. Then from the point of

subjectification issues a subject of enunciation, as a function of a mental

reality determined by that point. Then from the subject of enunciation

issues a subject of the statement, in other words, a subject bound to

statements in conformity with a dominant reality (of which the mental

reality just mentioned is a part, even when it seems to oppose it). What is

important, what makes the postsignifying passional line a line of subjecti-

fication or subjection, is the constitution, the doubling of the two sub-

jects, and the recoiling of one into the other, of the subject of enunciation

into the subject of the statement (the linguists acknowledge this when

they speak of the "imprint of the process of enunciation in the state-

ment"). Signifiance brought about uniformity in the substance of enunci-

ation; now subjectivity effects an individuation, collective or particular.

Substance has become subject, as they say. The subject of enunciation
recoils into the subject of the statement, to the point that the subject of the
statement resupplies subject of enunciation for another proceeding. The

subject of the statement has become the "respondent" or guarantor of the

subject of enunciation, through a kind of reductive echolalia, in a

biunivocal relation. This relation, this recoiling, is also that of mental

reality into the dominant reality. There is always an appeal to a dominant

reality that functions from within (already in the Old Testament, and dur-

ing the Reformation, with trade and capitalism). There is no longer even a

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need for a transcendent center of power; power is instead immanent and

melds with the "real," operating through normalization. A strange inven-

tion: as if in one form the doubled subject were the causeof the statements

of which, in its other form, it itself is a part. This is the paradox of the

legislator-subject replacing the signifying despot: the more you obey the

statements of the dominant reality, the more in command you are as sub-

ject of enunciation in mental reality, for in the end you are only obeying

yourself! You are the one in command, in your capacity as a rational

being. A new form of slavery is invented, namely, being slave to oneself, or

to pure "reason," the Cogito. Is there anything more passional than pure

reason? Is there a colder, more extreme, more self-interested passion than

the Cogito?

Althusser clearly brings out this constitution of social individuals as

subjects: he calls it interpellation ("Hey you, over there!") and calls the

point of subjectification the Absolute Subject; he analyzes the "specular

doubling" of subjects and for purposes of demonstration uses the example

of God, Moses, and the Jewish people.

Linguists like Benveniste adopt a

curious linguistic personology that is very close to the Cogito: the You,

which can doubtless designate the person one is addressing, but more

importantly, a point of subjectification on the basis of which each of us is

constituted as a subject. The /as subject of enunciation, designating the

person that utters and reflects its own use in the statement ("the empty

nonreferential sign"); this is the I appearing in propositions of the type "I

believe, I assume, I think..." Finally, the I as subject of the statement,

indicating a state for which a She or He could always be substituted ("I suf-

fer, I walk, I breathe, I feel.. .").

This is not, however, a question of a lin-

guistic operation, for a subject is never the condition of possibility of

language or the cause of the statement: there is no subject, only collective

assemblages of enunciation. Subjectification is simply one such assem-

blage and designates a formalization of expression or a regime of signs

rather than a condition internal to language. Neither is it a question of a

movement characteristic of ideology, as Althusser says: subjectification as

a regime of signs or a form of expression is tied to an assemblage, in other

words, an organization of power that is already fully functioning in the

economy, rather than superposing itself upon contents or relations

between contents determined as real in the last instance. Capital is a point

of subjectification par excellence.

The psychoanalytic cogito: the psychoanalyst presents him- or herself as

an ideal point of subjectification that brings the patient to abandon old,

so-called neurotic, points. The patient is partially a subject of enunciation

in all he or she says to the psychoanalyst, and under the artificial mental

conditions of the session: the patient is therefore called the "analysand."

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B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS D 131

But in everything else the patient says or does, he or she is a subject of the

statement, eternally psychoanalyzed, going from one linear proceeding to

another, perhaps even changing analysts, growing increasingly submissive

to the normalization of a dominant reality. In this sense, psychoanalysis,

with its mixed semiotic, fully participates in a line of subjectification. The

psychoanalyst does not even have to speak anymore, the analysand

assumes the burden of interpretation; as for the psychoanalyzed patient,

the more he or she thinks about "his" or "her" next session, or the preced-

ing one, in segments, the better a subject he or she is.

Just as the paranoid regime had two axes—one sign referring to another

(making the sign a signifier), and the signifier referring to the signified—so

too the passional regime, the line of subjectification, has two axes, one

syntagmatic and the other paradigmatic: as we have just seen, the first axis

is consciousness. Consciousness as passion is precisely that doubling of

subjects, of the subject of enunciation and the subject of the statement, and

the recoiling of one into the other. But the second form of subjectification

is love as passion, love-passion, another type of double, of doubling and

recoiling. Here again, a variable point of subjectification serves to distrib-

ute two subjects that as much conceal their faces as reveal them to each

other, that wed a line of flight, a line of deterritorialization forever drawing

them together and driving them apart. But everything changes: there is a

celibate side to this doubled consciousness, and there is a passional love

couple that no longer has any use for consciousness or reason. Yet it is the

same regime, even in betrayal and even if the betraying is done by a third

party. Adam and Eve, and Cain's wife (about whom the Bible should have

said more). Richard III, the traitor, is in the end given consciousness in a

dream, but only the strange face-off with Lady Anne, a meeting of two

countenances that conceal themselves knowing that they have promised

themselves to each other following the same line that will nonetheless sepa-

rate them. The most loyal and tender, or intense, love assigns subject of

enunciation and a subject of the statement that constantly switch places,

wrapped in the sweetness of being a naked statement in the other's mouth,

and of the other's being a naked enunciation in my own mouth. But there is

always a traitor in the making. What love is not betrayed? What cogito lacks

its evil genius, the traitor it will never be rid of? "Tristan . . . Isolde . . .

Isolde.. . Tristan": the cry of the two subjects climbs the scale of intensities

until it reaches the summit of a suffocating consciousness, whereas the ship

follows the line of the waters, the line of death and the unconscious,

betrayal, a continuous melody line. Passional love is a cogito built for two,

just as the cogito is a passion for the self alone. There is a potential couple in

the cogito, just as there is a doubling of a single virtual subject in

love-passion. Klossowski has created the strangest figures on the basis of

this

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complementarity between an over intense thought and an over feverish

couple. The line of subjectification is thus entirely occupied by the Double,

but it has two figures since there are two kinds of doubles: the syntagmatic

figure of consciousness, or the consciousness-related double, relating to

form (Self = Self [Moi = Moi]); and the paradigmatic figure of the couple,

or the passional double, relating to substance (Man = Woman; here, the

double is immediately the difference between the sexes).

We can follow the becoming of these doubles in mixed semiotics, which

are interminglings as well as degradations. On the one hand, the passional

love double, the couple in love-passion, falls into a conjugal relation or

even a "domestic squabble" situation: Which is the subject of enunciation?

Which is the subject of the statement? The battle of the sexes: You 're steal-
ing my thoughts. The domestic squabble has always been a cogito for two, a

war cogito. Strindberg took this fall of love-passion into despotic conju-

gality and hysterico-paranoid squabbling to its extreme ("she" says she

found it all by herself when in fact she owes it all to me, echo, thought theft,

O Strindberg!).

On the other hand, the consciousness-related double of

pure thought, the couple of the legislating subject, falls into a bureaucratic

relation and a new form of persecution in which one double takes over the

role of subject of enunciation while the other is reduced to a subject of the

statement; the cogito itself becomes an "office squabble," a bureaucratic

love delusion. A new form of bureaucracy replaces or conjugates with the

old imperial bureaucracy, the bureaucrat says / think (Kafka goes the fur-

thest in this direction, as in the example of Sortini and Sordini in The Cas-
tle, or the many subjectifications of Klamm).

Conjugality is the

development of the couple, and bureaucracy the development of the

cogito. But one is contained in the other: amorous bureaucracy, bureau-

cratic couple. Too much has been written on the double, haphazardly,

metaphysically, finding it everywhere, in any old mirror, without noticing

the specific regime it possesses both in a mixed semiotic where it intro-

duces new phases, and in the pure semiotic of subjectification where it

inscribes itself on a line of flight and introduces very particular figures.

Once again: the two figures of thought-consciousness and love-passion in

the postsignifying regime; the two moments of bureaucratic consciousness

and conjugal relation in the mixed fall or combination. But even in a mixed

state, the original line is easily discovered by semiotic analysis.

There is a redundancy of consciousness and love that is not the same as

the signifying redundancy of the other regime. In the signifying regime,

redundancy is a phenomenon of objective frequency involving signs or ele-

ments of signs (the phonemes, letters, and groups of letters in a language):

there is both a maximum frequency of the signifier in relation to each sign,

and a comparative frequency of one sign in relation to another. In any case,

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B.c.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS D 133

it could be said that this regime develops a kind of "wall" on which signs are

inscribed, in relation to one another and in relation to the signifier. In the

postsignifying regime, on the other hand, the redundancy is one of subjec-
tive resonance involving above all shifters, personal pronouns and proper

names. Here again, we may distinguish between the maximum resonance

of self-consciousness (Self = Self [Moi = Moi]) and a comparative reso-

nance of names (Tristan ... Isolde ...). This time, however, there is no

longer a wall upon which the frequency is tallied but instead a black hole

attracting consciousness and passion and in which they resonate. Tristan

calls Isolde, Isolde calls Tristan, both drawn toward the black hole of a

self-consciousness, carried by the tide toward death. When the linguists

distinguish between two forms of redundancy, frequency and resonance,

they often ascribe the latter a merely derivative status.

In fact, it is a

question of two semiotics that mix but retain their own distinct principles

(similarly, one could define other forms of redundancy, such as rhythmic,

gestural, or numerical, relating to the other regimes of signs). The most

essential distinction between the signifying regime and the subjective

regime and their respective redundancies is the movement of
deterritorialization they effectuate. Since the signifying sign refers only to

other signs, and the set of all signs to the signifier itself, the corresponding

semiotic enjoys a high level of deterritorialization; but it is a

deterritorialization that is still relative, expressed as frequency. In this

system, the line of flight remains negative, it is assigned a negative sign.

As we have seen, the subjective regime proceeds entirely differently:

precisely because the sign breaks its relation of signifiance with other

signs and sets off racing down a positive line of flight, it attains an
absolute deterritorialization expressed in the black hole of consciousness

and passion. The absolute deterritorialization of the cogito. That is why

subjective redundancy seems both to graft itself onto signifying

redundancy and to derive from it, as second-degree redundancy.

Things are even more complicated than we have let on. Subjectification

assigns the line of flight a positive sign, it carries deterritorialization to the

absolute, intensity to the highest degree, redundancy to a reflexive form,

etc. But it has its own way of repudiating the positivity it frees, or of

relativizing the absoluteness it attains, without, however, falling back to

the preceding regime. In this redundancy of resonance, the absolute of con-

sciousness is the absolute of impotence and the intensity of passion, the

heat of the void. This is because subjectification essentially constitutes

finite linear proceedings, one of which ends before the next begins: thus the

cogito is always recommenced, a passion or grievance is always recapitu-

lated. Every consciousness pursues its own death, every love-passion its

own end, attracted by a black hole, and all the black holes resonate together.

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Thus subjectification imposes on the line of flight a segmentarity that is

forever repudiating that line, and upon absolute deterritorialization a

point of abolition that is forever blocking that deterritorialization or

diverting it. The reason for this is simple: forms of expression and regimes

of signs are still strata (even considered in themselves, after abstracting

forms of content); subjectification is no less a stratum than signifiance.

The principal strata binding human beings are the organism, signifiance

and interpretation, and subjectification and subjection. These strata to-

gether are what separates us from the plane of consistency and the abstract

machine, where there is no longer any regime of signs, where the line of

flight effectuates its own potential positivity and deterritorialization its

absolute power. The problem, from this standpoint, is to tip the most favor-

able assemblage from its side facing the strata to its side facing the plane of

consistency or the body without organs. Subjectification carries desire to

such a point of excess and unloosening that it must either annihilate itself

in a black hole or change planes. Destratify, open up to a new function, a
diagrammatic function. Let consciousness cease to be its own double, and

passion the double of one person for another. Make consciousness an

experimentation in life, and passion a field of continuous intensities, an

emission of particles-signs. Make the body without organs of conscious-

ness and love. Use love and consciousness to abolish subjectification: "To

become the great lover, the magnetizer and catalyzer ... one has to first

experience the profound wisdom of being an utter fool."

Use the / think

for a becoming-animal, and love for a becoming-woman of man.

Desub-jectify consciousness and passion. Are there not diagrammatic

redundancies distinct from both signifying redundancies and subjective

redundancies? Redundancies that would no longer be knots of

arborescence but resumptions and upsurges in a rhizome? Stammer

language, be a foreigner in one's own tongue:

do domi not passi do not dominate

do not dominate your passive passions not

do devouring not not dominate

your rats your rations your rats rations not not. . .

It seems necessary to distinguish between three types of deterrito-
rialization: the first type is relative, proper to the strata, and culminates in
signifiance; the second is absolute, but still negative and stratic, and
appears in subjectification {Ratio et Passio); finally, there is the possibility
of a positive absolute deterritorialization on the plane of consistency or the
body without organs.

587 B.c.-AD. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS □ 135

We have not, of course, managed to eliminate forms of content (for

example, the role of the Temple, or the position of a dominant Reality,
etc.). What we have done is to isolate, under artificial conditions, a certain
number of semiotics displaying very diverse characteristics. The
presigni-fying semiotic, in which the "overcoding" marking the privileged
status of language operates diffusely: enunciation is collective, statements
themselves are polyvocal, and substances of expression are multiple;
relative deterritorialization is determined by the confrontation between
the territorialities and segmentary lineages that ward off the State
apparatus. The signifying semiotic: overcoding is fully effectuated by the
signifier, and by the State apparatus that emits it; there is uniformity of
enunciation, unification of the substance of expression, and control over
statements in a regime of circularity; relative deterritorialization is taken as
far as it can go by a redundant and perpetual referral from sign to sign.
The countersig-nifying semiotic: here, overcoding is assured by the
Number as form of expression or enunciation, and by the War Machine
upon which it depends; deterritorialization follows a line of active
destruction or abolition. The postsignifying semiotic, in which overcoding
is assured by the redundancy of consciousness; a subjectification of
enunciation occurs on a passional line that makes the organization of
power (pouvoir) immanent and raises deterritorialization to the absolute,
although in a way that is still negative.

(1) The Center or the Signifier; the faciality of the god or despot. (2) The Temple or Pal-
ace, with priests and bureaucrats. (3) The organization in circles and the sign referring
to other signs on the same circle or on different circles. (4) The interpretive develop-
ment of signifier into signified, which then reimparts signifier. (5) The expiatory ani-
mal; the blocking of the line of flight. (6) The scapegoat, or the negative sign of the line
of flight.

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Yet we must consider two aspects: on the one hand, these semiotics are

still concrete even after forms of content have been abstracted, but only to

the extent that they are mixed, that they constitute mixed combinations.

Every semiotic is mixed and only functions as such; each one necessarily

captures fragments of one or more other semiotics (surplus value of code).

Even from this perspective, the signifying semiotic has no privileged status

to apply toward the formation of a general semiology: in particular, the way

in which it combines with the passional semiotic of subjectification ("the

signifier for the subject") implies nothing that would privilege it over other

combinations, for example, the combination of the passional semiotic and

the countersignifying semiotic, or of the countersignifying semiotic and

the signifying semiotic itself (when the Nomads turn imperial), etc. There

is no general semiology.

For example, without privileging one regime over another, it is possible

to construct schemas of the signifying and postsignifying semiotics that

clearly illustrate the possibilities for concrete mixture.

The second aspect, complementary but very different, consists in the

possibility of transforming one abstract or pure semiotic into another, by

virtue of the translatability ensuing from overcoding as the special charac-

teristic of language. This time, it is no longer a question of concrete mixed

semiotics but of transformations of one abstract semiotic into another

(even though that transformation is not itself abstract, in other words,

effectively takes place without being performed by a "translator" in the

role of pure knower). All transformations taking a given semiotic into the

presignifying regime may be called analogical transformations; those that

take it into the signifying regime are symbolic; into the countersignifying

regime, polemical or strategic; into the postsignifying regime, conscious-
ness-related or mimetic; finally, transformations that blow apart semiotics

systems or regimes of signs on the plane of consistency of a positive abso-

lute deterritorialization are called diagrammatic. A transformation is not

the same thing as a statement in a pure semiotic; nor even an ambiguous

statement requiring a whole pragmatic analysis to determine the semiotic

it belongs to; nor a statement belonging to a mixed semiotic (although the

transformation may have that effect). A transformational statement marks

the way in which a semiotic translates for its own purposes a statement

originating elsewhere, and in so doing diverts it, leaving untransformable

residues and actively resisting the inverse transformation. Furthermore,

transformations are not limited to the ones we just listed. It is always

through transformation that a new semiotic is created in its own right.

Translations can be creative. New pure regimes of signs are formed through

transformation and translation. Again, there is no general semiology but

rather a transsemiotic.

(1) The point of subjectification, replacing the center of signfiance. (2) The two faces

turned away from each other. (3) The subject of enunciation resulting from the point of

subjectification and the turning away. (4) The subject of the statement, into which the

subject of enunciation recoils. (5) The succession of finite linear proceedings accompa-

nied by a new form of priest and a new bureaucracy. (6) The line of flight, which is freed

but still segmented, remaining negative and blocked.

In analogical transformations, we often see sleep, drugs, and amorous

rapture form expressions that translate into presignifying regimes the sub-

jective or signifying regimes one wishes to impose upon the expressions,

but which they resist by themselves imposing upon these regimes an unex-

pected segmentarity and polyvocality. Christianity underwent strange cre-

ative translations in its transmission to "barbarian" or even "savage"

peoples. The introduction of monetary signs into certain commercial cir-

cuits in Africa caused those signs to undergo an analogical transformation

that was very difficult to control (except when the circuits underwent a

destructive transformation instead).

The songs of black Americans,

including, especially, the words, would be a better example, since they

show how the slaves "translated" the English signifier and made presig-

nifying or even countersignifying use of the language, blending it with their

own African languages just as they blended old African work songs with

their new forced labor; these songs also show how, with Christianization

and the abolition of slavery, the slaves underwent a proceeding of

"subjectification" or even "individuation" that transformed their music,

while the music simultaneously transformed the proceeding by analogy;

and also how unique problems of "faciality" were posed when whites in

"blackface" appropriated the words and songs and blacks responded by

darkening their faces another hue, taking back their dances and songs, even

transforming or translating those of the whites.

Of course, the crudest

and most visible transformations were in the other direction: the symbolic

translations occurring when the signifier takes power. The preceding exam-

ples concerning monetary signs and rhythmic regimes can be repeated in

the opposite direction. The passage from an African dance to a white dance

587 B.c.-AD. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS □ 137

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often exhibits a consciousness-related or mimetic translation, accompa-

nied by a power takeover by signifiance and subjectification. ("In Africa

the dance is impersonal, sacred and obscene. When the phallus becomes

erect and is handled like a banana it is not a 'personal hard-on' we see but a

tribal erection. ... The hoochie-koochie dancer of the big city dances

alone—a fact of staggering significance. The law forbids response, forbids

participation. Nothing is left of the primitive rite but the 'suggestive'

movements of the body. What they suggest varies with the individual

observer.")

It is not simply linguistic, lexical, or even syntactic transformations that

determine the importance of a true semiotic translation but the opposite.

Crazy talk is not enough. In each case we must judge whether what we see

is an adaptation of an old semiotic, a new variety of a particular mixed

semiotic, or the process of creation of an as yet unknown regime. For exam-

ple, it is relatively easy to stop saying "I," but that does not mean that you

have gotten away from the regime of subjectification; conversely, you can

keep on saying "I," just for kicks, and already be in another regime in which

personal pronouns function only as fictions. Signifiance and interpretation

are so thick-skinned, they form such a sticky mixture with sub-

jectification, that it is easy to believe that you are outside them when you

are in fact still secreting them. People sometimes denounce interpretation

yet show so signifying a face that they simultaneously impose interpreta-

tion upon the subject, which continues to nourish itself on it in order to sur-

vive. Who can really believe that psychoanalysis is capable of changing a

semiotic amassing every deception? The only change there has been is a

role switch. Instead of a patient who signifies and a psychoanalyst who

interprets, we now have a signifying analyst and it is the patient who does

all the interpreting. In the antipsychiatric experiment of Kingsley Hall,

Mary Barnes, a former nurse turned "schizophrenic," embraces the new

semiotic of the Voyage, only to arrogate to herself a veritable power in the

community and reintroduce as a collective delusion the worst kind of psy-

choanalytic regime of interpretation ("She interpreted everything that was

done for her, or for anyone else for that matter. . .").

A highly stratified

semiotic is difficult to get away from. Even a presignifying, or

counter-signifying, semiotic, even an asignifying diagram, harbors knots of

coincidence just waiting to form virtual centers of signifiance and points

of subjectification. Of course, an operation of translation is not easy when

it is a question of destroying a dominant atmospheric semiotic. One of the

things of profound interest in Castaneda's books, under the influence of

drugs, or other things, and of a change of atmosphere, is precisely that they

show how the Indian manages to combat the mechanisms of interpretation

and instill in the disciple a presignifying semiotic, or even an asignifying

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diagram: Stop! You're making me tired! Experiment, don't signify and

interpret! Find your own places, territorialities, deterritorializations,

regime, lines of flight! Semiotize yourself instead of rooting around in your

prefab childhood and Western semiology. "Don Juan stated that in order

to arrive at 'seeing' one first had to 'stop the world.' 'Stopping the world'

was indeed an appropriate rendition of certain states of awareness in which

the reality of everyday life is altered because the flow of interpretation,

which ordinarily runs uninterruptedly, has been stopped by a set of circum-

stances alien to the flow."

In short, a true semiotic transformation

appeals to all kinds of variables, not only external ones, but also variables

implicit to language, internal to statements.

Pragmatics, then, already displays two components. The first could be

called generative since it shows how the various abstract regimes form con-

crete mixed semiotics, with what variants, how they combine, and which

one is predominant. The second is the transformational component, which

shows how these regimes of signs are translated into each other, especially

when there is a creation of a new regime. Generative pragmatics makes

tracings of mixed semiotics; transformational pragmatics makes maps of

transformations. Although a mixed semiotic does not necessarily imply

effective creativity, and may content itself with combinatory possibilities

without veritable transformation, it is still the transformational compo-

nent that accounts for the originality of a regime as well as for the novelty of

the mixes it enters at a given moment in a given domain. This second com-

ponent is therefore the more profound, and it is the only means of measur-

ing the elements of the first component.

For example, we may ask when

statements of the Bolshevik type first appeared, and how Leninism, at the

time of the break with the social democrats, effected a veritable transfor-

mation that created an original semiotic, even if its fall into the mixed

semiotic of Stalinist organization was inevitable. In an exemplary study,

Jean-Pierre Faye did a detailed analysis of the transformations that pro-

duced Nazism, viewed as a system of new statements in a given social field.

At what moment is a regime of signs established, and in what domain?

Throughout an entire people? In a fraction of that people? In a more or less

localizable margin inside a psychiatric hospital? (For as we have seen we

can find a semiotic of subjectification in the ancient history of the Jews,

but also in psychiatric diagnosis in the nineteenth century, with, of course,

profound variations and even veritable transformations in the correspond-

ing semiotic.) All of these questions fall within the purview of pragmatics.

There is no question that the most profound transformations and transla-

tions of our time are not occurring in Europe. Pragmatics should reject the

idea of an invariant immune from transformation, even if it is the in-

variant of a dominant "grammaticality." For language is a political affair

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before it is an affair for linguistics; even the evaluation of degrees of

gram-maticality is a political matter.

What is a semiotic, in other words, a regime of signs or a formalization

of expression? They are simultaneously more and less than language.

Language as a whole is defined by "superlinearity," its condition of possi-

bility; individual languages are defined by constants, elements, and rela-

tions of a phonological, syntactical, and semantic nature. Doubtless,

every regime of signs effectuates the condition of possibility of language

and utilizes language elements, but that is all. No regime can be identical

to that condition of possibility, and no regime has the property of con-

stants. As Foucault clearly shows, regimes of signs are only functions of
existence of language that sometimes span a number of languages and are

sometimes distributed within a single language; they coincide neither

with a structure nor with units of a given order, but rather intersect them

and cause them to appear in space and time. This is the sense in which

regimes of signs are assemblages of enunciation, which cannot be ade-

quately accounted for by any linguistic category: what makes a proposi-
tion or even a single word a "statement" pertains to implicit presupposi-

tions that cannot be made explicit, that mobilize pragmatic variables

proper to enunciation (incorporeal transformations). This precludes

explaining an assemblage in terms of the signifier or the subject, because

both pertain to variables of enunciation within the assemblage. It is

signifiance and subjectification that presuppose the assemblage, not the

reverse. The names we gave to the regimes of signs ("presignifying," "sig-

nifying," "countersignifying," "postsignifying") would remain evolution-

ist if heterogeneous functions or varieties of assemblages did not

effectively correspond to them (segmentarization, signifiance and inter-

pretation, numeration, subjectification). Regimes of signs are thus defined

by variables that are internal to enunciation but remain external to the

constants of language and irreducible to linguistic categories.

But at this point, everything turns around, and the reasons why a regime

of signs is less than language also become the reasons why it is more than

language. Only one side of the assemblage has to do with enunciation or

formalizes expression; on its other side, inseparable from the first, it for-

malizes contents, it is a machinic assemblage or an assemblage of bodies.

Now contents are not "signifieds" dependent upon a signifier in any way,

nor are they "objects" in any kind of relation of causality with the subject.

They have their own formalization and have no relation of symbolic corre-

spondence or linear causality with the form of expression: the two forms

are in reciprocal presupposition, and they can be abstracted from each

other only in a very relative way because they are two sides of a single

assemblage. We must therefore arrive at something in the assemblage itself

587 B.c.-AD. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS □ 141

that is still more profound than these sides and can account for both of the

forms in presupposition, forms of expression or regimes of signs (semiotic

systems) and forms of content or regimes of bodies (physical systems). This

is what we call the abstract machine, which constitutes and conjugates all of

the assemblage's cutting edges of deterritorialization.

We must say that

the abstract machine is necessarily "much more" than language. When lin-

guists (following Chomsky) rise to the idea of a purely language-based

abstract machine, our immediate objection is that their machine, far from

being too abstract, is not abstract enough because it is limited to the form of

expression and to alleged uni versals that presuppose language. Abstracting

content is an operation that appears all the more relative and inadequate

when seen from the viewpoint of abstraction itself. A true abstract machine

has no way of making a distinction within itself between a plane of expres-

sion and a plane of content because it draws a single plane of consistency,

which in turn formalizes contents and expressions according to strata and

reterritorializations. The abstract machine in itself is destratified,

deter-ritorialized; it has no form of its own (much less substance) and

makes no distinction within itself between content and expression, even

though outside itself it presides over that distinction and distributes it in

strata, domains, and territories. An abstract machine in itself is not

physical or corporeal, any more than it is semiotic; it is diagrammatic (it

knows nothing of the distinction between the artificial and the natural

either). It operates by matter, not by substance; by function, not by form.

Substances and forms are of expression "or" of content. But functions are

not yet "semiotically" formed, and matters are not yet "physically"

formed. The abstract machine is pure Matter-Function—a diagram

independent of the forms and substances, expressions and contents it will

distribute.

We define the abstract machine as the aspect or moment at which noth-

ing but functions and matters remain. A diagram has neither substance nor

form, neither content nor expression.

Substance is a formed matter, and

matter is a substance that is unformed either physically or semiotically.

Whereas expression and content have distinct forms, are really distinct

from each other, function has only "traits," of content and of expression,

between which it establishes a connection: it is no longer even possible to

tell whether it is a particle or a sign. A matter-content having only degrees

of intensity, resistance, conductivity, heating, stretching, speed, or tardi-

ness; and a function-expression having only "tensors," as in a system of

mathematical, or musical, writing. Writing now functions on the same

level as the real, and the real materially writes. The diagram retains the

most deterritorialized content and the most deterritorialized expression,

in order to conjugate them. Maximum deterritorialization sometimes

starts from a trait of content and sometimes from a trait of expression; that

142 D 587 B.c-AD. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS

trait is said to be "deterritorializing" in relation to the other precisely

because it diagrams it, carries it off, raises it to its own power. The most

deterritorialized element causes the other element to cross a threshold ena-

bling a conjunction of their respective deterritorializations, a shared accel-

eration. This is the abstract machine's absolute, positive

deterritoria-lization. That is why diagrams must be distinguished from
indexes, which are territorial signs, but also from icons, which pertain to

reterrito-rialization, and from symbols, which pertain to relative or

negative deterri-torialization.

Defined diagrammatically in this way, an

abstract machine is neither an infrastructure that is determining in the last

instance nor a transcendental Idea that is determining in the supreme

instance. Rather, it plays a piloting role. The diagrammatic or abstract

machine does not function to represent, even something real, but rather

constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality. Thus when it

constitutes points of creation or potentiality it does not stand outside

history but is instead always "prior to" history. Everything escapes,

everything creates—never alone, but through an abstract machine that

produces continuums of intensity, effects conjunctions of

deterritorialization, and extracts expressions and contents. This

Real-Abstract is totally different from the fictitious abstraction of a

supposedly pure machine of expression. It is an Absolute, but one that is

neither undifferentiated nor transcendent. Abstract machines thus have

proper names (as well as dates), which of course designate not persons or

subjects but matters and functions. The name of a musician or scientist is

used in the same way as a painter's name designates a color, nuance, tone, or

intensity: it is always a question of a conjunction of Matter and Function.

The double deterritorialization of the voice and the instrument is marked

by a Wagner abstract machine, a Webern abstract machine, etc. In physics

and mathematics, we may speak of a Riemann abstract machine, and in

algebra of a Galois abstract machine (defined precisely by an arbitrary

line, called the adjunctive line, which conjugates with a body taken as a

starting point), etc. There is a diagram whenever a singular abstract

machine functions directly in a matter.

Strictly speaking, therefore, there are no regimes of signs on the dia-

grammatic level, or on the plane of consistency, because form of expression

is no longer really distinct from form of content. The diagram knows only

traits and cutting edges that are still elements of content insofar as they are

material and of expression insofar as they are functional, but which draw

one another along, form relays, and meld in a shared deterritorialization:

particles-signs. There is nothing surprising in this, for the real distinction

between form of expression and form of content appears only with the

strata, and is different on each one. It is on the strata that the double articu-

lation appears that formalizes traits of expression and traits of content,

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each in its own right, turning matters into physically or semiotically

formed substances and functions into forms of expression or content.

Expression then constitutes indexes, icons, or symbols that enter regimes

or semiotic systems. Content then constitutes bodies, things, or objects

that enter physical systems, organisms, and organizations. The deeper

movement for conjugating matter and function—absolute

deterri-torialization, identical to the earth itself—appears only in the form

of respective territorialities, negative or relative deterritorializations, and

complementary reterritorializations. All of this culminates in a language

stratum that installs an abstract machine on the level of expression and

takes the abstraction of content even further, tending to strip it of any form

of its own (the imperialism of language, the pretensions to a general

semiology). In short, the strata substantialize diagrammatic matters and

separate a formed plane of content from a formed plane of expression.

They hold expressions and contents, separately substantialized and forma-

lized, in the pincers of a double articulation assuring their independence

and real distinction and enthroning a dualism that endlessly reproduces

and redivides. They shatter the continuums of intensity, introducing

breaks between different strata and within each stratum. They prevent

conjunctions of flight from forming and crush the cutting edges of

deterri-torialization, either by effecting reterritorializations that make

these movements merely relative, or by assigning certain of the lines an

entirely negative value, or again by segmenting them, blocking them,

plugging them, or plunging them into a kind of black hole.

Above all, diagrammaticism should not be confused with an operation

of the axiomatic type. Far from drawing creative lines of flight and conju-

gating traits of positive deterritorialization, axiomatics blocks all lines,

subordinates them to a punctual system, and halts the geometric and alge-

braic writing systems that had begun to run off in all directions. This hap-

pened in relation to the question of indeterminism in physics: a "reorder-

ing" was undertaken to reconcile it with physical determinism. Mathemat-

ical writing systems were axiomatized, in other words, restratified,

resemiotized, and material flows were rephysicalized. It is as much a politi-

cal as a scientific affair: science must not go crazy. Hilbert and de Broglie

were as much politicians as scientists: they reestablished order. An

axiomatization, a semiotization, a physicalization, is not a diagram but in

fact the opposite of a diagram. The program of a stratum, against the dia-

gram of the plane of consistency. This does not, however, preclude the

diagram's heading back down the road to escape and scattering new, singu-

lar abstract machines (the mathematical creation of improbable functions

was carried out in opposition to axiomatization, and the material inven-

tion of unfindable particles in opposition to physicalization). Science as

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such is like everything else; madness is as intrinsic to it as reorderings. The

same scientists may participate in both aspects, having their own madness,

police, signifiances, or subjectifications, as well as their own abstract

machines, all in their capacity as scientists. The phrase "the politics of sci-

ence" is a good designation for these currents, which are internal to science

and not simply circumstances and State factors that act upon it from the

outside, leading it to make as atomic bomb here and embark upon a space

program there. These political influences or determinations would not

exist if science itself did not have its own poles, oscillations, strata, and

destratifications, its own lines of flight and reorderings, in short, the more

or less potential events of its own politics, its own particular "polemics," its

own internal war machine (of which thwarted, persecuted, or hindered sci-

entists are historically a part). It is not enough to say that axiomatics does

not take invention and creation into account: it possesses a deliberate will

to halt or stabilize the diagram, to take its place by lodging itself on a level

of coagulated abstraction too large for the concrete but too small for the

real. We will see in what sense this is the "capitalist" level.

We cannot, however, content ourselves with a dualism between the

plane of consistency and its diagrams and abstract machines on the one

hand, and the strata and their programs and concrete assemblages on the

other. Abstract machines do not exist only on the plane of consistency,

upon which they develop diagrams; they are already present enveloped or

"encasted" in the strata in general, or even erected on particular strata

upon which they simultaneously organize a form of expression and a form

of content. What is illusory in the second case is the idea of an exclusively

expressive or language-based abstract machine, not the idea of an abstract

machine internal to the stratum and accounting for the relativity of those

two distinct forms. Thus there are two complementary movements, one by

which abstract machines work the strata and are constantly setting things

loose, another by which they are effectively stratified, effectively captured

by the strata. On the one hand, strata could never organize themselves if

they did not harness diagrammatic matters or functions and formalize

them from the standpoint of both expression and content; every regime of

signs, and even signifiance and subjectification, is still a diagrammatic

effect (although relativized and negativized). One the other hand, abstract

machines would never be present, even on the strata, if they did not have

the power or potentiality to extract and accelerate destratified

particles-signs (the passage to the absolute). Consistency is neither

totalizing nor structuring; rather, it is deterritorializing (a biological

stratum, for example, evolves not according to statistical phenomena but

rather according to cutting edges of deterritorialization). The security,

tranquillity, and ho-meostatic equilibrium of the strata are thus never

completely guaranteed:

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to regain a plane of consistency that inserts itself into the most diverse sys-

tems of stratification and jumps from one to the other, it suffices to prolong

the lines of flight working the strata, to connect the dots, to conjugate the

processes of deterritorialization. We have seen that signifiance and inter-

pretation, consciousness and passion, can prolong themselves following

these lines, and at the same time open out onto a properly diagrammatic

experience. All of these states or modes of the abstract machine coexist in

what we call the machinic assemblage. The assemblage has two poles or

vectors: one vector is oriented toward the strata, upon which it distributes

territorialities, relative deterritorializations, and reterritorializations; the

other is oriented toward the plane of consistency or destratification, upon

which it conjugates processes of deterritorialization, carrying them to the

absolute of the earth. It is along its stratic vector that the assemblage differ-

entiates a form of expression (from the standpoint of which it appears as a

collective assemblage of enunciation) from a form of content (from the

standpoint of which it appears as a machinic assemblage of bodies); it fits

one form to the other, one manifestation to the other, placing them in recip-

rocal presupposition. But along its diagrammatic or destratified vector, it

no longer has two sides; all it retains are traits of expression and content

from which it extracts degrees of deterritorialization that add together and

cutting edges that conjugate.

A regime of signs has more than just two components. It has, in fact, four

of them, which form the object of Pragmatics. The first was the generative

component, which shows how a form of expression located on the language

stratum always appeals to several combined regimes, in other words, how

every regime of signs or semiotic is concretely mixed. On the level of this

component, one can abstract forms of content, most successfully if empha-

sis is placed on the mixture of regimes in the form of expression: one should

not, however, conclude from this the predominance of a regime constitut-

ing a general semiology and unifying forms. The second, transformational,

component, shows how one abstract regime can be translated, transformed

into another, and especially how it can be created from other regimes. This

second component is obviously more profound, because all mixed regimes

presuppose these transformations from one regime to another, past, pres-

ent, or potential (as a function of the creation of new regimes). Once again,

one abstracts, or can abstract, content, since the analysis is limited to meta-

morphoses internal to the form of expression, even though the form of

expression is not adequate to account for them. The third component is
diagrammatic: it consists in taking regimes of signs or forms of expression

and extracting from them particles-signs that are no longer formalized but

instead constitute unformed traits capable of combining with one another.

This is the height of abstraction, but also the moment at which abstraction

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becomes real; everything operates through abstract-real machines (which

have names and dates). One can abstract forms of content, but one must

simultaneously abstract forms of expression; for what is retained of each

are only unformed traits. That is why an abstract machine that would oper-

ate purely on the level of language is an absurdity. It is clear that this dia-

grammatic component is in turn more profound than the transformational

component: the creations-transformations of a regime of signs operate by

the emergence of ever-new abstract machines. Finally, the last, properly
machinic, component is meant to show how abstract machines are effectu-

ated in concrete assemblages; it is these assemblages that give distinct form

to traits of expression, but not without doing the same for traits of

content—the two forms being in reciprocal presupposition, or having a

necessary, unformed relation that once again prevents the form of expres-

sion from behaving as though it were self-sufficient (although it is indepen-

dent or distinct in a strictly formal way).

Thus pragmatics (or schizoanalysis) can be represented by four circular

components that bud and form rhizomes.

(1) The generative component: the study of concrete mixed semiotics; their mixtures

and variations. (2) The transformational component: the study of pure semiotics; their

transformations-translations and the creation of new semiotics. (3) The diagrammatic

component: the study of abstract machines, from the standpoint of semiotically

unformed matters in relation to physically unformed matters. (4) The machinic com-

ponent: the study of the assemblages that effectuate abstract machines, simultaneously

semiotizing matters of expression and physicalizing matters of content.

Pragmatics as a whole would consist in this: making a tracing of the

mixed semiotics, under the generative component; making the transfor-

mational map of the regimes, with their possibilities for translation and

creation, for budding along the lines of the tracings; making the diagram of

the abstract machines that are in play in each case, either as potentialities

or as effective emergences; outlining the program of the assemblages that

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distribute everything and bring a circulation of movement with alternatives,

jumps, and mutations.

For example, in considering a given "proposition," in other words, a ver-

bal aggregate defined syntactically, semantically, and logically as the

expression of an individual or group ("I love you" or "I am jealous"), one

would begin by asking to which "statement" this proposition corresponds

in the group or individual (for the same proposition can be tied to com-

pletely different statements). This question means: What regime of signs is

the proposition taken up by and without which its syntactical, semantic,

and logical elements would remain totally empty universal conditions?

What nonlinguistic element, or variable of enunciation, gives it consis-

tency? There is a presignifying "I love you" of the collective type in which,

as Miller says, a dance weds all the women of the tribe; there is a

counter-signifying "I love you" of the distributive and polemical type that

has to do with war and relations of force (the "I love you" of Penthesilea

and Achilles); there is an "I love you" that is addressed to a center of

signifiance and uses interpretation to make a whole series of signifieds

correspond to the signifying chain; and there is a postsignifying or

passional "I love you" that constitutes a proceeding beginning from a

point of subjectification, then another, and yet another. Similarly, the

proposition "I am jealous" is clearly not the same statement in the

passional regime of subjectification as in the paranoid regime of

signifiance: these are two distinct delusions. Second, once it has been

determined which statement the proposition corresponds to in a given

group or individual at a given time, one would look into the possibilities

not only of mixture but also of translation and transformation into another

regime, or into statements belonging to other regimes; one would look at

what passes and does not pass in such a transformation, what remains

irreducible and what flows. Third, one could try to create new, as yet

unknown statements for that proposition, even if the result were a patois

of sensual delight, physical and semiotic systems in shreds, asubjective

affects, signs without signifiance where syntax, semantics, and logic are in

collapse. This research should go from the worst to the best since it would

cover precious, metaphorical, or stultifying regimes as well as

cries-whispers, feverish improvisations, becomings-animal,

becomings-molecular, real transsexualities, continuums of intensity, con-

stitutions of bodies without organs . .. These two poles are inseparable;

they entertain perpetual relations of transformation, conversion, jumping,

falling, and rising. This final research simultaneously brings into play, on

the one hand, abstract machines, diagrams and diagrammatic functions,

and, on the other hand, machinic assemblages, the formal distinctions they

make between expression and content, and their investments of words and

organs according to a relation of reciprocal presupposition. For example,

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the "I love you" of courtly love: What is its diagram, what abstract machine

emerges, and what is the new assemblage? These questions apply as much

to destratification as to the organization of strata. In short, there are no

syntactically, semantically, or logically definable propositions that tran-

scend or loom above statements. All methods for the

transcendentaliza-tion of language, all methods for endowing language

with universals, from Russell's logic to Chomsky's grammar, have fallen

into the worst kind of abstraction, in the sense that they validate a level

that is both too abstract and not abstract enough. Regimes of signs are not

based on language, and language alone does not constitute an abstract

machine, whether structural or generative. The opposite is the case. It is

language that is based on regimes of signs, and regimes of signs on

abstract machines, diagrammatic functions, and machinic assemblages

that go beyond any system of semiology, linguistics, or logic. There is no

universal prepositional logic, nor is there grammaticality in itself, any

more than there is signifier for itself. "Behind" statements and

semioticizations there are only machines, assemblages, and movements

of deterritorialization that cut across the stratification of the various

systems and elude both the coordinates of language and of existence. That

is why pragmatics is not a complement to logic, syntax, or semantics; on

the contrary, it is the fundamental element upon which all the rest depend.

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HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS?

concept but a practice, a set of practices. You never reach the Body without

Organs, you can't reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit. People

ask, So what is this BwO?—But you're already on it, scurrying like a ver-

min, groping like a blind person, or running like a lunatic: desert traveler

and nomad of the steppes. On it we sleep, live our waking lives, fight—fight

and are fought—seek our place, experience untold happiness and fabulous

defeats; on it we penetrate and are penetrated; on it we love. On November

28,1947, Artaud declares war on the organs: To be done with the judgment
of God, "for you can tie me up if you wish, but there is nothing more useless

than an organ."

Experimentation: not only radiophonic but also biologi-

cal and political, incurring censorship and repression. Corpus and Socius,

politics and experimentation. They will not let you experiment in peace.

The BwO: it is already under way the moment the body has had enough

of organs and wants to slough them off, or loses them. A long procession.

The hypochondriac body: the organs are destroyed, the damage has already

been done, nothing happens anymore. "Miss X claims that she no longer

has a brain or nerves or chest or stomach or guts. All she has left is the skin

and bones of a disorganized body. These are her own words."

The para-

noid body: the organs are continually under attack by outside forces, but

are also restored by outside energies. ("He lived for a long time without a

stomach, without intestines, almost without lungs, with a torn oesophagus,

without a bladder, and with shattered ribs, he used sometimes to swallow

part of his own larynx with his food, etc. But divine miracles ('rays') always

restored what had been destroyed.")

The schizo body, waging its own

active internal struggle against the organs, at the price of catatonia. Then

the drugged body, the experimental schizo: "The human body is scandal-

ously inefficient. Instead of a mouth and an anus to get out of order why not

have one all-purpose hole to eat and eliminate? We could seal up nose and

mouth, fill in the stomach, make an air hole direct into the lungs where it

should have been in the first place."

The masochist body: it is poorly

understood in terms of pain; it is fundamentally a question of the BwO. It

has its sadist or whore sew it up; the eyes, anus, urethra, breasts, and nose

are sewn shut. It has itself strung up to stop the organs from working;

flayed, as if the organs clung to the skin; sodomized, smothered, to make

sure everything is sealed tight.

Why such a dreary parade of sucked-dry, catatonicized, vitrified,

sewn-up bodies, when the BwO is also full of gaiety, ecstasy, and dance? So

why these examples, why must we start there? Emptied bodies instead of

full ones. What happened? Were you cautious enough? Not wisdom, cau-

tion. In doses. As a rule immanent to experimentation: injections of cau-

tion. Many have been defeated in this battle. Is it really so sad and

dangerous to be fed up with seeing with your eyes, breathing with your

HOW

DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS? □ 151

lungs, swallowing with your mouth, talking with your tongue, thinking with

your brain, having an anus and larynx, head and legs? Why not walk on

your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your

belly: the simple Thing, the Entity, the full Body, the stationary Voyage,

Anorexia, cutaneous Vision, Yoga, Krishna, Love, Experimentation.

Where psychoanalysis says, "Stop, find your self again," we should say

instead, "Let's go further still, we haven't found our BwO yet, we haven't

sufficiently dismantled our self." Substitute forgetting for anamnesis,

experimentation for interpretation. Find your body without organs. Find

out how to make it. It's a question of life and death, youth and old age, sad-

ness and joy. It is where everything is played out.

"Mistress, 1) You may tie me down on the table, ropes drawn tight, for

ten to fifteen minutes, time enough to prepare the instruments; 2) One

hundred lashes at least, a pause of several minutes; 3) You begin sewing,

you sew up the hole in the glans; you sew the skin around the glans to the

glans itself, preventing the top from tearing; you sew the scrotum to the skin

of the thighs. You sew the breasts, securely attaching a button with four

holes to each nipple. You may connect them with an elastic band with

buttonholes—Now you go on to the second phase: 4) You can choose either

to turn me over on the table so I am tied lying on my stomach, but with my

legs together, or to bind me to the post with my wrists together, and my legs

also, my whole body tightly bound; 5) You whip my back buttocks thighs, a

hundred lashes at least; 6) You sew my buttocks together, all the way up and

down the crack of my ass. Tightly, with a doubled thread, each stitch knot-

ted. If I am on the table, now tie me to the post; 7) You give me fifty thrashes

on the buttocks; 8) If you wish to intensify the torture and carry out your

threat from last time, stick the pins all the way into my buttocks as far as

they go; 9) Then you may tie me to the chair; you give me thirty thrashes on

the breasts and stick in the smaller pins; if you wish, you may heat them

red-hot beforehand, all or sorne. I should be tightly bound to the chair,

hands behind my back so my chest sticks out. I haven't mentioned burns,

only because I have a medical exam coming up in awhile, and they take a

long time to heal." This is not a phantasy, it is a program: There is an essen-

tial difference between the psychoanalytic interpretation of the phantasy

and the antipsychiatric experimentation of the program. Between the

phantasy, an interpretation that must itself be interpreted, and the motor

program of experimentation.

The BwO is what remains when you take

everything away. What you take away is precisely the phantasy, and

signifiances and subjectifications as a whole. Psychoanalysis does the

opposite: it translates everything into phantasies, it converts everything

into phantasy, it retains the phantasy. It royally botches the real, because it

botches the BwO.

152 D

HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS?

Something will happen. Something is already happening. But what

comes to pass on the BwO is not exactly the same as how you make yourself

one. However, one is included in the other. Hence the two phases set forth

in the preceding letter. Why two clearly distinguished phases, when the

same thing is done in both cases—sewing and flogging? One phase is for the

fabrication of the BwO, the other to make something circulate on it or pass

across it; the same procedures are nevertheless used in both phases, but

they must be done over, done twice. What is certain is that the masochist

has made himself a BwO under such conditions that the BwO can no longer

be populated by anything but intensities of pain, pain waves. It is false to

say that the masochist is looking for pain but just as false to say that he is

looking for pleasure in a particularly suspensive or roundabout way. The

masochist is looking for a type of BwO that only pain can fill, or travel over,

due to the very conditions under which that BwO was constituted. Pains

are populations, packs, modes of king-masochist-in-the-desert that he

engenders and augments. The same goes for the drugged body and intensi-

ties of cold, refrigerator waves. For each type of BwO, we must ask: (1) What

type is it, how is it fabricated, by what procedures and means (predeter-

mining what will come to pass)? (2) What are its modes, what comes to

pass, and with what variants and what surprises, what is unexpected and

what expected? In short, there is a very special relation of synthesis and

analysis between a given type of BwO and what happens on it: an a priori

synthesis by which something will necessarily be produced in a given mode

(but what it will be is not known) and an infinite analysis by which what is

produced on the BwO is already part of that body's production, is already

included in the body, is already on it (but at the price of an infinity of pas-

sages, divisions, and secondary productions). It is a very delicate experi-

mentation since there must not be any stagnation of the modes or slippage

in type: the masochist and the drug user court these ever-present dangers

that empty their BwO's instead of filling them.

You can fail twice, but it is the same failure, the same danger. Once at the

level of the constitution of the BwO and again at the level of what passes or

does not pass across it. You think you have made yourself a good BwO, that

you chose the right Place, Power {Puissance), and Collectivity (there is

always a collectivity, even when you are alone), and then nothing passes,

nothing circulates, or something prevents things from moving. A paranoid

point, a point of blockage, an outburst of delirium: it comes across clearly

in Speed, by William Burroughs, Jr. Is it possible to locate this danger

point, should the block be expelled, or should one instead "love, honor, and

serve degeneracy wherever it surfaces"? To block, to be blocked, is that not

still an intensity? In each case, we must define what comes to pass and what

does not pass, what causes passage and prevents it. As in the meat circuit

HOW

DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS? D 153

according to Lewin, something flows through channels whose sections are

delimited by doors with gatekeepers, passers-on.

Door openers and trap

closers, Malabars and Fierabras. The body is now nothing more than a set

of valves, locks, floodgates, bowls, or communicating vessels, each with a

proper name: a peopling of the BwO, a Metropolis that has to be managed

with a whip. What peoples it, what passes across it, what does the blocking?

A BwO is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by

intensities. Only intensities pass and circulate. Still, the BwO is not a scene,

a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass. It has noth-

ing to do with phantasy, there is nothing to interpret. The BwO causes

intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is

itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is mat-

ter that occupies space to a given degree—to the degree corresponding to

the intensities produced. It is nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the

matrix of intensity, intensity = 0; but there is nothing negative about that

zero, there are no negative or opposite intensities. Matter equals energy.

Production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at zero. That is

why we treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the organism

and the organization of the organs, before the formation of the strata; as the

intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, by

dynamic tendencies involving energy transformation and kinematic

movements involving group displacement, by migrations: all independent

of accessory forms because the organs appear and function here only as

pure intensities.

The organ changes when it crosses a threshold, when it

changes gradient. "No organ is constant as regards either function or posi-

tion, ... sex organs sprout anywhere,... rectums open, defecate and close,

... the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second

adjustments."

The tantric egg.

After all, is not Spinoza's Ethics the great book of the BwO? The attri-

butes are types or genuses of BwO's, substances, powers, zero intensities as

matrices of production. The modes are everything that comes to pass:

waves and vibrations, migrations, thresholds and gradients, intensities

produced in a given type of substance starting from a given matrix. The

masochist body as an attribute or genus of substance, with its production

of intensities and pain modes based on its degree 0 of being sewn up. The

drugged body as a different attribute, with its production of specific inten-

sities based on absolute Cold = 0. ("Junkies always beef about The Cold as

they call it, turning up their black coat collars and clutching their withered

necks . . . pure junk con. A junky does not want to be warm, he wants to be

cool-cooler-coLD. But he wants The Cold like he wants His Junk—

NOT

OUTSIDE where it does him no good but INSIDE so he can sit around with a

spine like a frozen hydraulic jack... his metabolism approaching Absolute

154 □

HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS?

Zero.")

Etc. The problem of whether there is a substance of all substances,

a single substance for all attributes, becomes: Is there a totality of all
BwO'sl If the BwO is already a limit, what must we say of the totality of all

BwO's? It is a problem not of the One and the Multiple but of a fusional

multiplicity that effectively goes beyond any opposition between the one

and the multiple. A formal multiplicity of substantial attributes that, as

such, constitutes the ontological unity of substance. There is a continuum

of all of the attributes or genuses of intensity under a single substance, and

a continuum of the intensities of a certain genus under a single type or

attribute. A continuum of all substances in intensity and of all intensities

in substance. The uninterrupted continuum of the BwO. BwO, imma-

nence, immanent limit. Drug users, masochists, schizophrenics, lovers—

all BwO's pay homage to Spinoza. The BwO is the field of immanence of

desire, the plane of consistency specific to desire (with desire defined as a

process of production without reference to any exterior agency, whether it

be a lack that hollows it out or a pleasure that fills it).

Every time desire is betrayed, cursed, uprooted from its field of

immanence, a priest is behind it. The priest cast the triple curse on desire:

the negative law, the extrinsic rule, and the transcendent ideal. Facing

north, the priest said, Desire is lack (how could it not lack what it desires?).

The priest carried out the first sacrifice, named castration, and all the men

and women of the north lined up behind him, crying in cadence, "Lack,

lack, it's the common law." Then, facing south, the priest linked desire to

pleasure. For there are hedonistic, even orgiastic, priests. Desire will be

assuaged by pleasure; and not only will the pleasure obtained silence desire

for a moment but the process of obtaining it is already a way of interrupting

it, of instantly discharging it and unburdening oneself of it. Pleasure as dis-

charge: the priest carries out the second sacrifice, named masturbation.

Then, facing east, he exclaimed: Jouissance is impossible, but impossible
jouissance is inscribed in desire. For that, in its very impossibility, is the

Ideal, the "manque-a-jouir that is life."

The priest carried out the third

sacrifice, phantasy or the thousand and one nights, the one hundred twenty

days, while the men of the East chanted: Yes, we will be your phantasy, your

ideal and impossibility, yours and also our own. The priest did not turn to

the west. He knew that in the west lay a plane of consistency, but he thought

that the way was blocked by the columns of Hercules, that it led nowhere

and was uninhabited by people. But that is where desire was lurking, west

was the shortest route east, as well as to the other directions, rediscovered

or deterritorialized.

The most recent figure of the priest is the psychoanalyst, with his or her

three principles: Pleasure, Death, and Reality. Doubtless, psychoanalysis

demonstrated that desire is not subordinated to procreation, or even to

HOW

DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS? □ 155

genitality. That was its modernism. But it retained the essentials; it even

found new ways of inscribing in desire the negative law of lack, the external

rule of pleasure, and the transcendent ideal of phantasy. Take the interpre-

tation of masochism: when the ridiculous death instinct is not invoked, it is

claimed that the masochist, like everybody else, is after pleasure but can

only get it through pain and phantasied humiliations whose function is to

allay or ward off deep anxiety. This is inaccurate; the masochist's suffering

is the price he must pay, not to achieve pleasure, but to untie the

pseudobond between desire and pleasure as an extrinsic measure. Pleasure

is in no way something that can be attained only by a detour through suffer-

ing; it is something that must be delayed as long as possible because it inter-

rupts the continuous process of positive desire. There is, in fact, a joy that is

immanent to desire as though desire were filled by itself and its contempla-

tions, a joy that implies no lack or impossibility and is not measured by

pleasure since it is what distributes intensities of pleasure and prevents

them from being suffused by anxiety, shame, and guilt. In short, the mas-

ochist uses suffering as a way of constituting a body without organs and

bringing forth a plane of consistency of desire. That there are other ways,

other procedures than masochism, and certainly better ones, is beside the

point; it is enough that some find this procedure suitable for them.

Take a masochist who did not undergo psychoanalysis: "

PROGRAM

. . .

At night, put on the bridle and attach my hands more tightly, either to the

bit with the chain, or to the big belt right after returning from the bath. Put

on the entire harness right away also, the reins and thumbscrews, and

attach the thumbscrews to the harness. My penis should be in a metal

sheath. Ride the reins for two hours during the day, and in the evening as

the master wishes. Confinement for three or four days, hands still tied, the

reins alternately tightened and loosened. The master will never approach

her horse without the crop, and without using it. If the animal should dis-

play impatience or rebelliousness, the reins will be drawn tighter, the mas-

ter will grab them and give the beast a good thrashing."

What is this

masochist doing? He seems to be imitating a horse, Equus eroticus, but

that's not it. Nor are the horse and the master-trainer or mistress images of

the mother or father. Something entirely different is going on: a

becoming-animal essential to masochism. It is a question of forces. The

masochist presents it this way: Training axiom—destroy the instinctive
forces in order to replace them with transmitted forces. In fact, it is less a

destruction than an exchange and circulation ("what happens to a horse

can also happen to me"). Horses are trained: humans impose upon the

horse's instinctive forces transmitted forces that regulate the former,

select, dominate, overcode them. The masochist effects an inversion of

signs: the horse transmits its transmitted forces to him, so that the

masochist's innate

156 □

HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS?

forces will in turn be tamed. There are two series, the horse's (innate force,

force transmitted by the human being), and the masochist's (force trans-

mitted by the horse, innate force of the human being). One series explodes

into the other, forms a circuit with it: an increase in power or a circuit of

intensities. The "master," or rather the mistress-rider, the equestrian,

ensures the conversion of forces and the inversion of signs. The masochist

constructs an entire assemblage that simultaneously draws and fills the

field of immanence of desire; he constitutes a body without organs or plane

of consistency using himself, the horse, and the mistress. "Results to be

obtained: that I am kept in continual expectancy of actions and orders, and

that little by little all opposition is replaced by a fusion of my person with

yours. ... Thus at the mere thought of your boots, without even acknowl-

edging it, I must feel fear. In this way, it will no longer be women's legs that
have an effect on me, and if it pleases you to command me to receive your

caresses, when you have had them and if you make me feel them, you will

give me the imprint of your body as I have never had it before and never

would have had it otherwise."'

Legs are still organs, but the boots now only

determine a zone of intensity as an imprint or zone on a BwO.

Similarly, or actually in a different way, it would be an error to interpret

courtly love in terms of a law of lack or an ideal of transcendence. The

renunciation of external pleasure, or its delay, its infinite regress, testifies

on the contrary to an achieved state in which desire no longer lacks any-

thing but fills itself and constructs its own field of immanence. Pleasure is

an affection of a person or a subject; it is the only way for persons to "find

themselves" in the process of desire that exceeds them; pleasures, even the

most artificial, are reterritorializations. But the question is precisely

whether it is necessary to find oneself. Courtly love does not love the self,

any more than it loves the whole universe in a celestial or religious way. It is

a question of making a body without organs upon which intensities pass,

self and other—not in the name of a higher level of generality or a broader

extension, but by virtue of singularities that can no longer be said to be per-

sonal, and intensities that can no longer be said to be extensive. The field of

immanence is not internal to the self, but neither does it come from an

external self or a nonself. Rather, it is like the absolute Outside that knows

no Selves because interior and exterior are equally a part of the immanence

in which they have fused. "Joy" in courtly love, the exchange of hearts, the

test or "assay": everything is allowed, as long as it is not external to desire or

transcendent to its plane, or else internal to persons. The slightest caress

may be as strong as an orgasm; orgasm is a mere fact, a rather deplorable

one, in relation to desire in pursuit of its principle. Everything is allowed:

all that counts is for pleasure to be the flow of desire itself, Immanence,

instead of a measure that interrupts it or delivers it to the three phantoms,

HOW

DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS? D 157

namely, internal lack, higher transcendence, and apparent exteriority.

pleasure is not the norm of desire, it is not by virtue of a lack that is impossi-

ble to fill but, on the contrary, by virtue of its positivity, in other words, the

plane of consistency it draws in the course of its process.

A great Japanese compilation of Chinese Taoist treatises was made in

982-984. We see in it the formation of a circuit of intensities between

female and male energy, with the woman playing the role of the innate or

instinctive force (Yin) stolen by or transmitted to the man in such a way

that the transmitted force of the man (Yang) in turn becomes innate, all the

more innate: an augmentation of powers.

The condition for this circula-

tion and multiplication is that the man not ejaculate. It is not a question of

experiencing desire as an internal lack, nor of delaying pleasure in order to

produce a kind of externalizable surplus value, but instead of constituting

an intensive body without organs, Tao, a field of immanence in which

desire lacks nothing and therefore cannot be linked to any external or tran-

scendent criterion. It is true that the whole circuit can be channeled toward

procreative ends (ejaculation when the energies are right); that is how Con-

fucianism understood it. But this is true only for one side of the assemblage

of desire, the side facing the strata, organisms, State, family... It is not

true for the other side, the Tao side of destratification that draws a plane of

consistency proper to desire. Is the Tao masochistic? Is courtly love Taoist?

These questions are largely meaningless. The field of immanence or plane

of consistency must be constructed. This can take place in very different

social formations through very different assemblages (perverse, artistic,

scientific, mystical, political) with different types of bodies without

organs. It is constructed piece by piece, and the places, conditions, and

techniques are irreducible to one another. The question, rather, is whether

the pieces can fit together, and at what price. Inevitably, there will be mon-

strous crossbreeds. The plane of consistency would be the totality of all

BwO's, a pure multiplicity of immanence, one piece of which may be Chi-

nese, another American, another medieval, another petty perverse, but all

in a movement of generalized deterritorialization in which each person

takes and makes what she or he can, according to tastes she or he will have

succeeded in abstracting from a Self [Moi], according to a politics or strat-

egy successfully abstracted from a given formation, according to a given

procedure abstracted from its origin.

We distinguish between: (1) BwO's, which are different types, genuses,

or substantial attributes. For example, the Cold of the drugged BwO, the

Pain of the masochist BwO. Each has its degree 0 as its principle of produc-

tion (remissio). (2) What happens on each type of BwO, in other words, the

modes, the intensities that are produced, the waves that pass (latitudo). (3)

The potential totality of all BwO's, the plane of consistency (Omnitudo,

158 □

HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS?

sometimes called the BwO). There are a number of questions. Not only

how to make oneself a BwO, and how to produce the corresponding

intensities without which it would remain empty (not exactly the same

question). But also how to reach the plane of consistency. How to sew up,

cool down, and tie together all the BwO's. If this is possible to do, it is only

by conjugating the intensities produced on each BwO, by producing a con-

tinuum of all intensive continuities. Are not assemblages necessary to fab-

ricate each BwO, is not a great abstract Machine necessary to construct the

plane of consistency? Gregory Bateson uses the term plateau for continu-

ous regions of intensity constituted in such a way that they do not allow

themselves to be interrupted by any external termination, any more than

they allow themselves to build toward a climax; examples are certain sex-

ual, or aggressive, processes in Balinese culture.

A plateau is a piece of

immanence. Every BwO is made up of plateaus. Every BwO is itself a pla-

teau in communication with other plateaus on the plane of consistency.

The BwO is a component of passage.

A rereading of H'eliogabale and Les Tarahumaras. For Heliogabalus is

Spinoza, and Spinoza is Heliogabalus revived. And the Tarahumaras are

experimentation, peyote. Spinoza, Heliogabalus, and experimentation

have the same formula: anarchy and unity are one and the same thing, not

the unity of the One, but a much stranger unity that applies only to the mul-

tiple.

These two books by Artaud express the multiplicity of fusion,

fusionability as infinite zero, the plane of consistency, Matter where no

gods go; principles as forces, essences, substances, elements, remissions,

productions; manners of being or modalities as produced intensities,

vibrations, breaths, Numbers. Finally, the difficulty of reaching this world

of crowned Anarchy if you go no farther than the organs ("the liver that

turns the skin yellow, the brain wracked by syphilis, the intestines that

expel filth") and if you stay locked into the organism, or into a stratum that

blocks the flows and anchors us in this, our world.

We come to the gradual realization that the BwO is not at all the opposite

of the organs. The organs are not its enemies. The enemy is the organism.

The BwO is opposed not to the organs but to that organization of the organs

called the organism. It is true that Artaud wages a struggle against the

organs, but at the same time what he is going after, what he has it in for, is

the organism: The body is the body. Alone it stands. And in no need of
organs. Organism it never is. Organisms are the enemies of the body.

The

BwO is not opposed to the organs; rather, the BwO and its "true organs,"

which must be composed and positioned, are opposed to the organism, the

organic organization of the organs. The judgment of God, the system of the

judgment of God, the theological system, is precisely the operation of He

who makes an organism, an organization of organs called the organism,

HOW

DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS? D 159

because He cannot bear the BwO, because He pursues it and rips it apart so

He can be first, and have the organism be first. The organism is already

that, the judgment of God, from which medical doctors benefit and on

which they base their power. The organism is not at all the body, the BwO;

rather, it is a stratum on the BwO, in other words, a phenomenon of accu-

mulation, coagulation, and sedimentation that, in order to extract useful

labor from the BwO, imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant

and hierarchized organizations, organized transcendences. The strata are

bonds, pincers. "Tie me up if you wish." We are continually stratified. But

who is this we that is not me, for the subject no less than the organism

belongs to and depends on a stratum? Now we have the answer: the BwO is

that glacial reality where the alluvions, sedimentations, coagulations,

foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism—and also a significa-

tion and a subject—occur. For the judgment of God weighs upon and is

exercised against the BwO; it is the BwO that undergoes it. It is in the BwO

that the organs enter into the relations of composition called the organism.

The BwO howls: "They've made me an organism! They've wrongfully

folded me! They've stolen my body!" The judgment of God uproots it from

its immanence and makes it an organism, a signification, a subject. It is the

BwO that is stratified. It swings between two poles, the surfaces of stratifi-

cation into which it is recoiled, on which it submits to the judgment, and

the plane of consistency in which it unfurls and opens to experimentation.

If the BwO is a limit, if one is forever attaining it, it is because behind each

stratum, encasted in it, there is always another stratum. For many a stra-

tum, and not only an organism, is necessary to make the judgment of God.

A perpetual and violent combat between the plane of consistency, which

frees the BwO, cutting across and dismantling all of the strata, and the sur-

faces of stratification that block it or make it recoil.

Let us consider the three great strata concerning us, in other words, the

ones that most directly bind us: the organism, signifiance, and

subjectifi-cation. The surface of the organism, the angle of signifiance and

interpretation, and the point of subjectification or subjection. You will be

organized, you will be an organism, you will articulate your

body—otherwise you're just depraved. You will be signifier and

signified, interpreter and interpreted—otherwise you're just a deviant.

You will be a subject, nailed down as one, a subject of the enunciation

recoiled into a subject of the statement—otherwise you're just a tramp.

To the strata as a whole, the BwO opposes disarticulation (or n

articulations) as the property of the plane of consistency, experimentation

as the operation on that plane (no signifier, never interpret!), and

nomadism as the movement (keep moving, even in place, never stop

moving, motionless voyage, desubjectification). What does it mean to

disarticulate, to cease to be an organism? How can we

160 D HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS?

convey how easy it is, and the extent to which we do it every day? And how

necessary caution is, the art of dosages, since overdose is a danger. You

don't do it with a sledgehammer, you use a very fine file. You invent

self-destructions that have nothing to do with the death drive. Dismantling

the organism has never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body

to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits,

conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of

intensity, and territories and deterritorializations measured with the craft

of a surveyor. Actually, dismantling the organism is no more difficult

than dismantling the other two strata, signifiance and subjectification.

Signifiance clings to the soul just as the organism clings to the body, and

it is not easy to get rid of either. And how can we unhook ourselves from

the points of subjectification that secure us, nail us down to a dominant

reality? Tearing the conscious away from the subject in order to make it a

means of exploration, tearing the unconscious away from signifiance and

interpretation in order to make it a veritable production: this is assuredly

no more or less difficult than tearing the body away from the organism.

Caution is the art common to all three; if in dismantling the organism there

are times one courts death, in slipping away from signifiance and subjection

one courts falsehood, illusion and hallucination and psychic death. Artaud

weighs and measures every word: the conscious "knows what is good for it

and what is of no value to it: it knows which thoughts and feelings it can

receive without danger and with profit, and which are harmful to the

exercise of its freedom. Above all, it knows just how far its own being

goes, and just how far it has not yet gone or does not have the right to go

without sinking into the unreal, the illusory, the unmade, the unprepared ...

a Plane which normal consciousness does not reach but which Ciguri

allows us to reach, and which is the very mystery of all poetry. But there is

in human existence another plane, obscure and formless, where

consciousness has not entered, and which surrounds it like an

unilluminated extension or a menace, as the case may be. And which itself

gives off adventurous sensations, perceptions. These are those shameless

fantasies which affect an unhealthy conscious. ... I too have had false

sensations and perceptions and I have believed in them."

You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and

you have to keep small supplies of signifiance and subjectification, if only

to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it,

when things, persons, even situations, force you to; and you have to keep

small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond

to the dominant reality. Mimic the strata. You don't reach the BwO, and its

plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying. That is why we encountered

the paradox of those emptied and dreary bodies at the very beginning: they

HOW

DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS? □ 161

had emptied themselves of their organs instead of looking for the point at

which they could patiently and momentarily dismantle the organization of

the organs we call the organism. There are, in fact, several ways of botching

the BwO: either one fails to produce it, or one produces it more or less, but

nothing is produced on it, intensities do not pass or are blocked. This is

because the BwO is always swinging between the surfaces that stratify it

and the plane that sets it free. If you free it with too violent an action, if you

blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing

the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged

toward catastrophe. Staying stratified—organized, signified, subjected—

is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw

the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down

on us heavier than ever. This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a

stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous

place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines

of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try

out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new

land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one

succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and

escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. Connect, con-

jugate, continue: a whole "diagram," as opposed to still signifying and sub-

jective programs. We are in a social formation; first see how it is stratified

for us and in us and at the place where we are; then descend from the strata

to the deeper assemblage within which we are held; gently tip the assem-

blage, making it pass over to the side of the plane of consistency. It is only

there that the BwO reveals itself for what it is: connection of desires, con-

junction of flows, continuum of intensities. You have constructed your

own little machine, ready when needed to be plugged into other collective

machines. Castaneda describes a long process of experimentation (it

makes little difference whether it is with peyote or other things): let us

recall for the moment how the Indian forces him first to find a "place,"

already a difficult operation, then to find "allies," and then gradually to

give up interpretation, to construct flow by flow and segment by segment

lines of experimentation, becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, etc. For

the BwO is all of that: necessarily a Place, necessarily a Plane, necessarily a

Collectivity (assembling elements, things, plants, animals, tools, people,

powers, and fragments of all of these; for it is not "my" body without

organs, instead the "me" (moi) is on it, or what remains of me, unalterable

and changing in form, crossing thresholds).

In the course of Castaneda's books, the reader may begin to doubt the

existence of the Indian Don Juan, and many other things besides. But that

has no importance. So much the better if the books are a syncretism rather

162 □ HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS?

than an ethnographical study, and the protocol of an experiment rather

than an account of an initiation. The fourth book, Tales of Power, is about

the living distinction between the "Tonal" and the "Nagual." The tonal

seems to cover many disparate things: It is the organism, and also all that is

organized and organizing; but it is also signifiance, and all that is signifying

or signified, all that is susceptible to interpretation, explanation, all that is

memorizable in the form of something recalling something else; finally, it

is the Self (Moi), the subject, the historical, social, or individual person,

and the corresponding feelings. In short, the tonal is everything, including

God, the judgment of God, since it "makes up the rules by which it appre-

hends the world. So, in a manner of speaking, it creates the world."

Yet

the tonal is only an island. For the nagual is also everything. And it is the

same everything, but under such conditions that the body without organs

has replaced the organism and experimentation has replaced all interpreta-

tion, for which it no longer has any use. Flows of intensity, their fluids, their

fibers, their continuums and conjunctions of affects, the wind, fine

segmentation, microperceptions, have replaced the world of the subject.

Becomings, becomings-animal, becomings-molecular, have replaced his-

tory, individual or general. In fact, the tonal is not as disparate as it seems:

it includes all of the strata and everything that can be ascribed to the strata,

the organization of the organism, the interpretations and explanations of

the signifiable, the movements of subjectification. The nagual, on the con-

trary, dismantles the strata. It is no longer an organism that functions but a

BwO that is constructed. No longer are there acts to explain, dreams or

phantasies to interpret, childhood memories to recall, words to make sig-

nify; instead, there are colors and sounds, becomings and intensities (and

when you become-dog, don't ask if the dog you are playing with is a dream

or a reality, if it is "your goddam mother" or something else entirely). There

is no longer a Self [Moi] that feels, acts, and recalls; there is "a glowing fog, a

dark yellow mist" that has affects and experiences movements, speeds.

The important thing is not to dismantle the tonal by destroying it all of a

sudden. You have to diminish it, shrink it, clean it, and that only at certain

moments. You have to keep it in order to survive, to ward off the assault of

the nagual. For a nagual that erupts, that destroys the tonal, a body without

organs that shatters all the strata, turns immediately into a body of noth-

ingness, pure self-destruction whose only outcome is death: "The tonal

must be protected at any cost."

We still have not answered the question of why there are so many dan-

gers, and so many necessary precautions. It is not enough to set up an

abstract opposition between the strata and the BwO. For the BwO already

exists in the strata as well as on the destratified plane of consistency, but in

a totally different manner. Take the organism as a stratum: there is indeed a

HOW

DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS? □ 163

BwO that opposes the organization of the organs we call the organism, but

there is also a BwO of the organism that belongs to that stratum. Cancerous
tissue: each instant, each second, a cell becomes cancerous, mad, prolife-

rates and loses its configuration, takes over everything; the organism must

resubmit it to its rule or restratify it, not only for its own survival, but also

to make possible an escape from the organism, the fabrication of the

"other" BwO on the plane of consistency. Take the stratum of signifiance:

once again, there is a cancerous tissue, this time of signifiance, a burgeon-

ing body of the despot that blocks any circulation of signs, as well as

preventing the birth of the asignifying sign on the "other" BwO. Or take a

stifling body of subjectification, which makes a freeing all the more

unlikely by forbidding any remaining distinction between subjects. Even if

we consider given social formations, or a given stratic apparatus within a

formation, we must say that every one of them has a BwO ready to gnaw,

proliferate, cover, and invade the entire social field, entering into relations

of violence and rivalry as well as alliance and complicity. A BwO of money

(inflation), but also a BwO of the State, army, factory, city, Party, etc. If the

strata are an affair of coagulation and sedimentation, all a stratum needs is

a high sedimentation rate for it to lose its configuration and articulations,

and to form its own specific kind of tumor, within itself or in a given forma-

tion or apparatus. The strata spawn their own BwO's, totalitarian and fas-

cist BwO's, terrifying caricatures of the plane of consistency. It is not

enough to make a distinction between full BwO's on the plane of consis-

tency and empty BwO's on the debris of strata destroyed by a too-violent

destratification. We must also take into account cancerous BwO's in a stra-

tum that has begun to proliferate. The three-body problem. Artaud said that

outside the "plane" is another plane surrounding us with "an

unillu-minated extension or a menace, as the case may be." It is a struggle

and as such is never sufficiently clear. How can we fabricate a BwO for

ourselves without its being the cancerous BwO of a fascist inside us, or

the empty BwO of a drug addict, paranoiac, or hypochondriac? How can

we tell the three Bodies apart? Artaud was constantly grappling with this

problem. The extraordinary composition of To Be Done with the
Judgment of God: he begins by cursing the cancerous body of America,

the body of war and money; he denounces the strata, which he calls

"caca"; to the strata he opposes the true Plane, even if it is only peyote,

the little trickle of the Tarahumaras; but he also knows about the dangers

of a too-sudden, careless destratification. Artaud was constantly grappling

with all of that, and flowed with it. Letter to Hitler: "Dear Sir, In 1932 in the

Ider Cafe in Berlin, on one of the evenings when I made your acquaintance

and shortly before you took power, I showed you roadblocks on a map that
was not just a map of geography, roadblocks against me, an act of force

aimed in a certain

164 □

HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS?

number of directions you indicated to me. Today Hitler I lift the road-

blocks I set down! The Parisians need gas. Yours, A.A.—P.S. Be it under-

stood, dear sir, that this is hardly an invitation, it is above all a warning."

That map that is not only a map of geography is something like a BwO

intensity map, where the roadblocks designate thresholds and the gas,

waves or flows. Even if Artaud did not succeed for himself, it is certain that

through him something has succeeded for us all.

The BwO is the egg. But the egg is not regressive; on the contrary, it is

perfectly contemporary, you always carry it with you as your own milieu of

experimentation, your associated milieu. The egg is the milieu of pure

intensity, spatium not extension, Zero intensity as principle of production.

There is a fundamental convergence between science and myth, embryol-

ogy and mythology, the biological egg and the psychic or cosmic egg: the egg

always designates this intensive reality, which is not undifferentiated, but

is where things and organs are distinguished solely by gradients, migra-

tions, zones of proximity. The egg is the BwO. The BwO is not "before" the

organism; it is adjacent to it and is continually in the process of construct-

ing itself. If it is tied to childhood, it is not in the sense that the adult

regresses to the child and the child to the Mother, but in the sense that the

child, like the Dogon twin who takes a piece of the placenta with him, tears

from the organic form of the Mother an intense and destratified matter

that on the contrary constitutes his or her perpetual break with the past, his

or her present experience, experimentation. The BwO is a childhood block,

a becoming, the opposite of a childhood memory. It is not the child

"before" the adult, or the mother "before" the child: it is the strict contem-

poraneousness of the adult, of the adult and the child, their map of compar-

ative densities and intensities, and all of the variations on that map. The

BwO is precisely this intense germen where there are not and cannot be

either parents or children (organic representation). This is what Freud

failed to understand about Weissmann: the child as the germinal contem-

porary of its parents. Thus the BwO is never yours or mine. It is always a

body. It is no more projective than it is regressive. It is an involution, but

always a contemporary, creative involution. The organs distribute them-

selves on the BwO, but they distribute themselves independently of the

form of the organism; forms become contingent, organs are no longer any-

thing more than intensities that are produced, flows, thresholds, and gradi-

ents. "A" stomach, "an" eye, "a" mouth: the indefinite article does not lack

anything; it is not indeterminate or undifferentiated, but expresses the

pure determination of intensity, intensive difference. The indefinite arti-

cle is the conductor of desire. It is not at all a question of a fragmented,

splintered body, of organs without the body (OwB). The BwO is exactly the

opposite. There are not organs in the sense of fragments in relation to a lost

HOW

DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS? D 165

unity, nor is there a return to the undifferentiated in relation to a

differen-tiable totality. There is a distribution of intensive principles of

organs, with their positive indefinite articles, within a collectivity or

multiplicity, inside an assemblage, and according to machinic

connections operating on a BwO. Logos spermaticos. The error of

psychoanalysis was to understand BwO phenomena as regressions,

projections, phantasies, in terms of an image of the body. As a result, it

only grasps the flipside of the BwO and immediately substitutes family

photos, childhood memories, and part-objects for a worldwide intensity

map. It understands nothing about the egg nor about indefinite articles

nor about the contemporaneousness of a continually self-constructing

milieu.

The BwO is desire; it is that which one desires and by which one de-

sires. And not only because it is the plane of consistency or the field of

immanence of desire. Even when it falls into the void of too-sudden

destra-tification, or into the proliferation of a cancerous stratum, it is still

desire. Desire stretches that far: desiring one's own annihilation, or

desiring the power to annihilate. Money, army, police, and State desire,

fascist desire, even fascism is desire. There is desire whenever there is the

constitution of a BwO under one relation or another. It is a problem not of

ideology but of pure matter, a phenomenon of physical, biological,

psychic, social, or cosmic matter. That is why the material problem

confronting schizoanalysis is knowing whether we have it within our means

to make the selection, to distinguish the BwO from its doubles: empty

vitreous bodies, cancerous bodies, totalitarian and fascist. The test of desire:

not denouncing false desires, but distinguishing within desire between that

which pertains to stratic proliferation, or else too-violent destratification,

and that which pertains to the construction of the plane of consistency

(keep an eye out for all that is fascist, even inside us, and also for the

suicidal and the demented). The plane of consistency is not simply that

which is constituted by the sum of all BwO's. There are things it rejects;

the BwO chooses, as a function of the abstract machine that draws it.

Even within a BwO (the masochist body, the drugged body, etc.), we

must distinguish what can be composed on the plane and what cannot.

There is a fascist use of drugs, or a suicidal use, but is there also a possible

use that would be in conformity with the plane of consistency? Even

paranoia: Is there a possibility of using it that way in part? When we

asked the question of the totality of all BwO's, considered as substantial

attributes of a single substance, it should have been understood, strictly

speaking, to apply only to the plane. The plane is the totality of the full

BwO's that have been selected (there is no positive totality including the

cancerous or empty bodies). What is the nature of this totality? Is it solely

logical? Or must we say that each BwO, from a basis in its own genus,

produces effects identical or analogous to the effects other

168 D

YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY

child, woman, mother, man, father, boss, teacher, police officer, does not

speak a general language but one whose signifying traits are indexed to spe-

cific faciality traits. Faces are not basically individual; they define zones of

frequency or probability, delimit a field that neutralizes in advance any

expressions or connections unamenable to the appropriate significations.

Similarly, the form of subjectivity, whether consciousness or passion,

would remain absolutely empty if faces did not form loci of resonance that

select the sensed or mental reality and make it conform in advance to a

dominant reality. The face itself is redundancy. It is itself in redundancy

with the redundancies of signifiance or frequency, and those of resonance

or subjectivity. The face constructs the wall that the signifier needs in order

to bounce off of; it constitutes the wall of the signifier, the frame or screen.

The face digs the hole that subjectification needs in order to break through;

it constitutes the black hole of subjectivity as consciousness or passion, the

camera, the third eye.

Or should we say things differently? It is not exactly the face that consti-

tutes the wall of the signifier or the hole of subjectivity. The face, at least the

concrete face, vaguely begins to take shape on the white wall. It vaguely

begins to appear in the black hole. In film, the close-up of the face can be

said to have two poles: make the face reflect light or, on the contrary,

emphasize its shadows to the point of engulfing it "in pitiless darkness."

psychologist once said that the face is a visual percept that crystallizes out

of "different varieties of vague luminosity without form or dimension." A

suggestive whiteness, a hole that captures, a face. According to this

account, the dimensionless black hole and formless white wall are already

there to begin with. And there are already a number of possible combina-

tions in the system: either black holes distribute themselves on the white

wall, or the white wall unravels and moves toward a black hole combining

all black holes, hurtling them together or making them "crest." Sometimes

faces appear on the wall, with their holes; sometimes they appear in the

hole, with their linearized, rolled-up wall. A horror story, the face is a hor-

ror story. It is certain that the signifier does not construct the wall that it

needs all by itself; it is certain that subjectivity does not dig its hole all

alone. Concrete faces cannot be assumed to come ready-made. They are

engendered by an abstract machine of faciality (visageite), which produces

them at the same time as it gives the signifier its white wall and subjectivity

its black hole. Thus the black hole/white wall system is, to begin with, not a

face but the abstract machine that produces faces according to the change-

able combinations of its cogwheels. Do not expect the abstract machine to

resemble what it produces, or will produce.

The abstract machine crops up when you least expect it, at a chance

juncture when you are just falling asleep, or into a twilight state or halluci-

YEAR

ZERO: FACIALITY □ 169

nating, or doing an amusing physics experiment ... Kafka's novella,

"Blumfeld":

the bachelor returns home in the evening to find two little

ping-pong balls jumping around by themselves on the "wall" constituted

by the floor. They bounce everywhere and even try to hit him in the face.

They apparently contain other, still smaller, electric balls. Blumfeld finally

manages to lock them up in the black hole of a wardrobe. The scene contin-

ues the next day when Blumfeld tries to give the balls to a small, feeble-

minded boy and two grimacing little girls, and then at the office, where he

encounters his two grimacing and feebleminded assistants, who want to

make off with a broom. In a wonderful ballet by Debussy and Nijinsky, a

little tennis ball comes bouncing onto the stage at dusk, and at the end

another ball appears in a similar fashion. This time, between the two balls,

two girls and a boy who watches them develop passional dance and facial

traits in vague luminosities (curiosity, spite, irony, ecstasy. . .).

There is

nothing to explain, nothing to interpret. It is the pure abstract machine of a

twilight state. White wall/black hole? But depending on the combinations,

the wall could just as well be black, and the hole white. The balls can bounce

off of a wall or spin into a black hole. Even upon impact they can have the

relative role of a hole in relation to the wall, just as when they are rolling

straight ahead they can have the relative role of a wall in relation to the hole

they are heading for. They circulate in the white wall/black hole system.

Nothing in all of this resembles a face, yet throughout the system faces are

distributed and faciality traits organized. Nevertheless, the abstract

machine can be effectuated in other things besides faces, but not in any

order, and not without the necessary foundation (raisons).

The face has been a major concern of American psychology, in particu-

lar the relation between the mother and the child through eye-to-eye con-

tact. Four-eye machine? Let us recall certain stages in the research: (1)

Isakower's studies on falling asleep, in which so-called proprioceptive sen-

sations of a manual, buccal, cutaneous, or even vaguely visual nature recall

the infantile mouth-breast relation. (2) Lewin's discovery of a white screen

of the dream, which is ordinarily covered by visual contents but remains

white when the only dream contents are proprioceptive sensations (this

screen or white wall, once again, is the breast as it approaches, getting

larger and then pressing flat). (3) Spitz's interpretation according to which

the white screen, rather than being a representation of the breast itself as an

object of tactile sensation or contact, is a visual percept implying a mini-

mum of distance and upon which the mother's face appears for the child to

use as a guide in finding the breast. Thus there is a combination of two very

different kinds of elements: manual, buccal, or cutaneous proprioceptive

sensations; and the visual perception of the face seen from the front against

the white screen, with the shape of the eyes drawn in for black holes. This

170 □ YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY

visual perception very quickly assumes decisive importance for the act of

eating, in relation to the breast as a volume and the mouth as a cavity, both

experienced through touch.

We can now propose the following distinction: the face is part of a

surface-holes, holey surface, system. This system should under no cir-

cumstances be confused with the volume-cavity system proper to the

(proprioceptive) body. The head is included in the body, but the face is not.

The face is a surface: facial traits, lines, wrinkles; long face, square face, tri-

angular face; the face is a map, even when it is applied to and wraps a vol-

ume, even when it surrounds and borders cavities that are now no more

than holes. The head, even the human head, is not necessarily a face. The

face is produced only when the head ceases to be a part of the body, when it

ceases to be coded by the body, when it ceases to have a multidimensional,

polyvocal corporeal code—when the body, head included, has been

decoded and has to be overcoded'by something we shall call the Face. This

amounts to saying that the head, all the volume-cavity elements of the

head, have to be facialized. What accomplishes this is the screen with holes,

the white wall/black hole, the abstract machine producing faciality. But the

operation does not end there: if the head and its elements are facialized, the

entire body also can be facialized, comes to be facialized as part of an inevi-

table process. When the mouth and nose, but first the eyes, become a holey

surface, all the other volumes and cavities of the body follow. An operation

worthy of Doctor Moreau: horrible and magnificent. Hand, breast, stom-

ach, penis and vagina, thigh, leg and foot, all come to be facialized. Fetish-

ism, erotomania, etc., are inseparable from these processes of

facializa-tion. It is not at all a question of taking a part of the body and

making it resemble a face, or making a dream-face dance in a cloud. No

anthropomorphism here. Facialization operates not by resemblance but by

an order of reasons. It is a much more unconscious and machinic

operation that draws the entire body across the holey surface, and in which

the role of the face is not as a model or image, but as an overcoding of all

of the decoded parts. Everything remains sexual; there is no sublimation,

but there are new coordinates. It is precisely because the face depends on
an abstract machine that it is not content to cover the head, but touches all

other parts of the body, and even, if necessary, other objects without

resemblance. The question then becomes what circumstances trigger the
machine that produces the face and facialization. Although the head, even

the human head, is not necessarily a face, the face is produced in

humanity. But it is produced by a necessity that does not apply to human

beings "in general." The face is not animal, but neither is it human in

general; there is even something absolutely inhuman about the face. It

would be an error to proceed as though the face became inhuman only

beyond a certain threshold: close-

YEAR

ZERO: FACIALITY □ 171

up, extreme magnification, recondite expression, etc. The inhuman in

human beings: that is what the face is from the start. It is by nature a

close-up, with its inanimate white surfaces, its shining black holes, its

emptiness and boredom. Bunker-face. To the point that if human beings

have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and

facializations, to become imperceptible, to become clandestine, not by

returning to animality, nor even by returning to the head, but by quite

spiritual and special becomings-animal, by strange true becomings that get

past the wall and get out of the black holes, that make faciality traits

themselves finally elude the organization of the face—freckles dashing

toward the horizon, hair carried off by the wind, eyes you traverse instead of

seeing yourself in or gazing into in those glum face-to-face encounters

between signifying subjectivities. "I no longer look into the eyes of the

woman I hold in my arms but I swim through, head and arms and legs, and

I see that behind the sockets of the eyes there is a region unexplored, the

world of futurity, and here there is no logic whatsoever. ... I have broken the

wall. . .. My eyes are useless, for they render back only the image of the

known. My whole body must become a constant beam of light, moving

with an ever greater rapidity, never arrested, never looking back, never

dwindling.... Therefore I close my ears, my eyes, my mouth."

BwO. Yes,

the face has a great future, but only if it is destroyed, dismantled. On the

road to the asignifying and asubjective. But so far we have explained

nothing of what we sense.

The move from the body-head system to the face system has nothing to

do with an evolution or genetic stages. Nor with phenomenological posi-

tions. Nor with integrations of part-objects, or structural or structuring sys-

tems. Nor can there be any appeal to a preexisting subject, or one brought

into existence, except by this machine specific to faciality. In the literature

of the face, Sartre's text on the look and Lacan's on the mirror make the

error of appealing to a form of subjectivity or humanity reflected in a

phenomenological field or split in a structural field. The gaze is but secon-
dary in relation to thegazeless eyes, to the black hole of faciality. The mirror
is but secondary in relation to the white wall of faciality. Neither will we

speak of a genetic axis, or the integration of part-objects. Any approach

based on stages in ontogenesis is arbitrary: it is thought that what is fastest

is primary, or even serves as a foundation or springboard for what comes

next. An approach based on part-objects is even worse; it is the approach of

a demented experimenter who flays, slices, and anatomizes everything in

sight, and then proceeds to sew things randomly back together again. You

can make any list of part-objects you want: hand, breast, mouth, eyes...

It's still Frankenstein. What we need to consider is not fundamentally

organs without bodies, or the fragmented body; it is the body without

organs, animated by various intensive movements that determine the

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nature and emplacement of the organs in question and make that body an

organism, or even a system of strata of which the organism is only a part. It

becomes apparent that the slowest of movements, or the last to occur or

arrive, is not the least intense. And the fastest may already have converged

with it, connected with it, in the disequilibrium of a nonsynchronic devel-

opment of strata that have different speeds and lack a sequence of stages

but are nevertheless simultaneous. The question of the body is not one of

part-objects but of differential speeds.

These movements are movements of deterritorialization. They are what

"make" the body an animal or human organism. For example, the prehen-

sile hand implies a relative deterritorialization not only of the front paw but

also of the locomotor hand. It has a correlate, the use-object or tool: the

club is a deterritorialized branch. The breast of the woman, with her up-

right posture, indicates a deterritorialization of the animal's mammary

gland; the mouth of the child, adorned with lips by an outfolding of the

mucous membranes, marks a deterritorialization of the snout and mouth

of the animal. Lips-breast: each serves as a correlate of the other.

The

human head implies a deterritorialization in relation to the animal and has

as its correlate the organization of a world, in other words, a milieu that has

itself been deterritorialized (the steppe is the first "world," in contrast to

the forest milieu). But the face represents a far more intense, if slower,

deterritorialization. We could say that it is an absolute deterritorialization:

it is no longer relative because it removes the head from the stratum of the

organism, human or animal, and connects it to other strata, such as

signi-fiance and subjectification. Now the face has a correlate of great

importance: the landscape, which is not just a milieu but a

deterritorialized world. There are a number of face-landscape correlations,

on this "higher" level. Christian education exerts spiritual control over

both faciality and landscapity (paysageit'e): Compose them both, color

them in, complete them, arrange them according to a complementarity

linking landscapes to faces.

Face and landscape manuals formed a

pedagogy, a strict discipline, and were an inspiration to the arts as much as

the arts were an inspiration to them. Architecture positions its

ensembles—houses, towns or cities, monuments or factories—to

function like faces in the landscape they transform. Painting takes up the

same movement but also reverses it, positioning a landscape as a face,

treating one like the other: "treatise on the face and the landscape." The

close-up in film treats the face primarily as a landscape; that is the

definition of film, black hole and white wall, screen and camera. But the

same goes for the earlier arts, architecture, painting, even the novel:

close-ups animate and invent all of their correlations. So, is your mother a

landscape or a face? A face or a factory? (Godard.) All faces envelop an

unknown, unexplored landscape; all landscapes are populated

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by a loved or dreamed-of face, develop a face to come or already past. What

face has not called upon the landscapes it amalgamated, sea and hill; what

landscape has not evoked the face that would have completed it, providing

an unexpected complement for its lines and traits? Even when painting

becomes abstract, all it does is rediscover the black hole and white wall, the

great composition of the white canvas and black slash. Tearing, but also

stretching of the canvas along an axis of escape (fuite), at a vanishing point
(point defuite), along a diagonal, by a knife slice, slash, or hole: the machine

is already in place that always functions to produce faces and landscapes,

however abstract. Titian began his paintings in black and white, not to

make outlines to fill in, but as the matrix for each of the colors to come.

The novel—A flock of geese flew which the snow had dazzled. [Perceval]

saw them and heard them, for they were going away noisily because of a fal-
con which came drawing after them at a great rate until he found abandoned
one separated from the flock, and he struck it so and bruised it that he
knockedit down to earth.... When Perceval saw the trampled snow on which
the goose had lain, and the blood which appeared around, he leaned upon his
lance and looked at that image, for the blood and the snow together seemed
to him like the fresh color which was on the face of his friend, and he thinks
until he forgets himself; for the vermilion seated on white was on her face just
the same as these three drops of blood on the white snow.... We have seen a
knight who is dozing on his charger. Everything is there: the redundancy

specific to the face and landscape, the snowy white wall of the

landscape-face, the black hole of the falcon and the three drops distributed

on the wall; and, simultaneously, the silvery line of the landscape-face

spinning toward the black hole of the knight deep in catatonia. Cannot the

knight, at certain times and under certain conditions, push the movement

further still, crossing the black hole, breaking through the white wall,

dismantling the face— even if the attempt may backfire?

All of this is in

no way characteristic of the genre of the novel only at the end of its

history; it is there from the beginning, it is an essential part of the genre. It

is false to see Don Quixote as the end of the chivalric novel, invoking the

hero's hallucinations, harebrained ideas, and hypnotic or cataleptic states. It

is false to see novels such as Beckett's as the end of the novel in general,

invoking the black holes, the characters' line of deterritorialization, the

schizophrenic promenades of Molloy or the Unnameable, their loss of

their names, memory, or purpose. The novel does have an evolution, but

that is surely not it. The novel has always been defined by the adventure

of lost characters who no longer know their name, what they are looking

for, or what they are doing, amnesiacs, ataxics, catatonics. They

differentiate the genre of the novel from the genres of epic or drama

(when the dramatic or epic hero is stricken with folly or forgetting, etc., it

is in an entirely different way). La princesse de

174 D YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY

Cleves is a novel precisely by virtue of what seemed paradoxical to the peo-

ple of the time: the states of absence or "rest," the sleep that overtakes the

characters. There is always a Christian education in the novel. Molloy is the

beginning of the genre of the novel. When the novel began, with Chretien

de Troyes, for example, the essential character that would accompany it

over the entire course of its history was already there: The knight of the

novel of courtly love spends his time forgetting his name, what he is doing,

what people say to him, he doesn't know where he is going or to whom he is

speaking, he is continually drawing a line of absolute deterritorialization,

but also losing his way, stopping, and falling into black holes. "He awaits

chivalry and adventure." Open Chretien de Troyes to any page and you will

find a catatonic knight seated on his steed, leaning on his lance, waiting,

seeing the face of his loved one in the landscape; you have to hit him to

make him respond. Lancelot, in the presence of the queen's white face,

doesn't notice his horse plunge into the river; or he gets into a passing cart

and it turns out to be the cart of disgrace. There is a face-landscape aggre-

gate proper to the novel, in which black holes sometimes distribute them-

selves on a white wall, and the white line of the horizon sometimes spins

toward a black hole, or both simultaneously.

Theorems of Deterritorialization, or

Machinic Propositions

First theorem: One never deterritorializes alone; there are always at least

two terms, hand-use object, mouth-breast, face-landscape. And each of the

two terms reterritorializes on the other. Reterritorialization must not be

confused with a return to a primitive or older territoriality: it necessarily

implies a set of artifices by which one element, itself deterritorialized,

serves as a new territoriality for another, which has lost its territoriality as

well. Thus there is an entire system of horizontal and complementary

reter-ritorializations, between hand and tool, mouth and breast, face and

landscape. Second theorem: The fastest of two elements or movements of

deterritorialization is not necessarily the most intense or most deterri-

torialized. Intensity of deterritorialization must not be confused with

speed of movement or development. The fastest can even connect its inten-

sity to the slowest, which, as an intensity, does not come after the fastest but

is simultaneously at work on a different stratum or plane (for example, the

way the breast-mouth relation is guided from the start by a plane of

faciality). Third theorem: It can even be concluded from this that the least

deterritorialized reterritorializes on the most deterritorialized. This is

where the second system of reterritorializations comes in, the vertical

system running from bottom to top. This is the sense in which not only

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ZERO: FACIALITY □ 175

the mouth but also the breast, hand, the entire body, even the tool, are

"facialized." As a general rule, relative deterritorializations (transcoding)

reterritorialize on a deterritorialization that is in certain respects absolute

(overcoding). We have seen that the deterritorialization of the head into a

face is absolute but remains negative in that it passes from one stratum to

another, from the stratum of the organism to those of signifiance and

subjectification. The hand and breast reterritorialize on the face and in the

landscape: they are facialized at the same time as they are landscapified.

Even a use-object may come to be facialized: you might say that a house,

utensil, or object, an article of clothing, etc., is watching me, not because it

resembles a face, but because it is taken up in the white wall/black hole

process, because it connects to the abstract machine of facialization. The

close-up in film pertains as much to a knife, cup, clock, or kettle as to a face

or facial element, for example, Griffith's "the kettle is watching me." Is it

not fair to say, then, that there are close-ups in novels, as when Dickens

writes the opening line of The Cricket on the Hearth: "The kettle began

it. . .",

and in painting, when a utensil becomes a face-landscape from

within, or when a cup on a tablecloth or a teapot is facialized, in Bonnard,

Vuillard? Fourth theorem: The abstract machine is therefore effectuated

not only in the faces that produce it but also to varying degrees in body

parts, clothes, and objects that it facializes following an order of reasons

(rather than an organization of resemblances).

Yet the question remains: When does the abstract machine of faciality

enter into play? When is it triggered? Take some simple examples: the

maternal power operating through the face during nursing; the passional

power operating through the face of the loved one, even in caresses; the

political power operating through the face of the leader (streamers, icons,

and photographs), even in mass actions; the power of film operating

through the face of the star and the close-up; the power of television. It is

not the individuality of the face that counts but the efficacy of the cipher-

ing it makes possible, and in what cases it makes it possible. This is an affair

not of ideology but of economy and the organization of power (pouvoir).

We are certainly not saying that the face, the power of the face (la puissance
du visage), engenders and explains social power (pouvoir). Certain assem-
blages of power (pouvoir) require the production of a face, others do not. If

we consider primitive societies, we see that there is very little that operates

through the face: their semiotic is nonsignifying, nonsubjective, essentially

collective, polyvocal, and corporeal, playing on very diverse forms and

substances. This polyvocality operates through bodies, their volumes,

their internal cavities, their variable exterior connections and coordinates

(territorialities). A fragment from a manual semiotic, a manual sequence,

may be coordinated, without subordination or unification, with an oral

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sequence, or a cutaneous one, or a rhythmic one, etc. Lizot, for example,

shows how "the dissociation of duty, ritual and daily life is almost total...

it is strange, inconceivable to us": during mourning behavior, certain

people make obscene jokes while others cry; or an Indian abruptly stops

crying and begins to repair his flute; or everybody goes to sleep. "The same

goes for incest. There is no incest prohibition; instead, there are sequences

of incest that connect with sequences of prohibition following specific

coordinates. Paintings, tattoos, or marks on the skin embrace the

multidi-mensionality of bodies. Even masks ensure the head's belonging

to the body, rather than making it a face. Doubtless, there are profound

movements of deterritorialization that shake up the coordinates of the

body and outline particular assemblages of power; however, they connect

the body not to faciality but to becomings-animal, in particular with the

help of drugs. Of course, there is no less spirituality for that, for these

becomings-animal involve an animal Spirit—a jaguar-spirit, bird-spirit,

ocelot-spirit, toucan-spirit—that takes possession of the body's interior,

enters its cavities, and fills its volumes instead of making a face for it.

Possession expresses a direct relation between Voices and the body rather

than a relation to the face. Shaman, warrior, and hunter organizations of

power, fragile and precarious, are all the more spiritual by virtue of the

fact that they operate through corporeality, animality, and vegetality. When

we said earlier that the human head still belongs to the stratum of the

organism, we obviously were not denying the existence of culture and

society among these peoples; we were merely saying that these cultures'

and societies' codes pertain to bodies, to the belonging of heads to bodies,

to the ability of the body-head system to become and receive souls, and to

receive them as friends while repulsing enemy souls. "Primitives" may

have the most human of heads, the most beautiful and most spiritual, but

they have no face and need none.

The reason is simple. The face is not a universal. It is not even that of the

white man; it is White Man himself, with his broad white cheeks and the

black hole of his eyes. The face is Christ. The face is the typical European,

what Ezra Pound called the average sensual man, in short, the ordinary

everyday Erotomaniac (nineteenth-century psychiatrists were right to say

that erotomania, unlike nymphomania, often remains pure and chaste;

this is because it operates through the face and facialization). Not a univer-

sal, but fades totius universi. Jesus Christ superstar: he invented the

facialization of the entire body and spread it everywhere (the Passion of

Joan of Arc, in close-up). Thus the face is by nature an entirely specific

idea, which did not preclude its acquiring and exercising the most general

of functions: the function of biuni vocalization, or binarization. It has two

aspects: the abstract machine of faciality, insofar as it is composed by a

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black hole/white wall system, functions in two ways, one of which concerns

the units or elements, the other the choices. Under the first aspect, the

black hole acts as a central computer, Christ, the third eye that moves

across the wall or the white screen serving as general surface of reference.

Regardless of the content one gives it, the machine constitutes a facial unit,

an elementary face in biunivocal relation with another: it is a man or a

woman, a rich person or a poor one, an adult or a child, a leader or a subject,

"an x or a y." The movement of the black hole across the screen, the trajec-

tory of the third eye over the surface of reference, constitutes so many

dichotomies or arborescences, like four-eye machines made of elementary

faces linked together two by two. The face of a teacher and a student, father

and son, worker and boss, cop and citizen, accused and judge ("the judge

had a stern expression, his eyes were horizonless..."): concrete individu-

alized faces are produced and transformed on the basis of these units, these

combinations of units—like the face of a rich child in which a military call-

ing is already discernible, that West Point chin. You don't so much have a

face as slide into one.

Under the second aspect, the abstract machine of faciality assumes a

role of selective response, or choice: given a concrete face, the machine

judges whether it passes or not, whether it goes or not, on the basis of the

elementary facial units. This time, the binary relation is of the "yes-no"

type. The empty eye or black hole absorbs or rejects, like a half-doddering

despot who can still give a signal of acquiescence or refusal. The face of a

given teacher is contorted by tics and bathed in an anxiety that makes it "no

go." A defendant, a subject, displays an overaffected submission that turns

into insolence. Or someone is too polite to be honest. A given face is neither

a man's nor a woman's. Or it is neither a poor person's nor a rich person's.

Is it someone who lost his fortune? At every moment, the machine rejects

faces that do not conform, or seem suspicious. But only at a given level of

choice. For it is necessary to produce successive divergence-types of devi-

ance for everything that eludes biunivocal relationships, and to establish

binary relations between what is accepted on first choice and what is only

tolerated on second, third choice, etc. The white wall is always expanding,

and the black hole functions repeatedly. The teacher has gone mad, but

madness is a face conforming to the «th choice (not the last, however, since

there are mad faces that do not conform to what one assumes madness

should be). A ha! It's not a man and it's not a woman, so it must be a

trans-vestite: The binary relation is between the "no" of the first category

and the "yes" of the following category, which under certain conditions may

just as easily mark a tolerance as indicate an enemy to be mowed down at all

costs. At any rate, you've been recognized, the abstract machine has you

inscribed in its overall grid. It is clear that in its new role as deviance

□ II ►

178 □ YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY

detector, the faciality machine does not restrict itself to individual cases
but operates in just as general a fashion as it did in its first role, the compu-
tation of normalities. If the face is in fact Christ, in other words, your aver-
age ordinary White Man, then the first deviances, the first
divergence-types, are racial: yellow man, black man, men in the second
or third category. They are also inscribed on the wall, distributed by the
hole. They must be Christianized, in other words, facialized. European
racism as the white man's claim has never operated by exclusion, or by
the designation of someone as Other: it is instead in primitive societies
that the stranger is grasped as an "other."

Racism operates by the

determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face,
which endeavors to integrate nonconforming traits into increasingly
eccentric and backward waves, sometimes tolerating them at given places
under given conditions, in a given ghetto, sometimes erasing them from
the wall, which never abides alterity (it's a Jew, it's an Arab, it's a Negro,
it's a lunatic . . .). From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there
are no people on the outside. There are only people who should be like us
and whose crime it is not to be. The dividing line is not between inside
and outside but rather is internal to simultaneous signifying chains and
successive subjective choices. Racism never detects the particles of the
other; it propagates waves of sameness until those who resist
identification have been wiped out (or those who only allow themselves to
be identified at a given degree of divergence). Its cruelty is equaled only by
its incompetence and naivete.

On the brighter side, painting has exploited all the resources of the

Christ-face. Painting has taken the abstract white wall/black hole machine
of faciality in all directions, using the face of Christ to produce every kind
of facial unit and every degree of deviance. In this respect, there is an
exultation in the painting of the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, like an
unbridled freedom. Not only did Christ preside over the facialization of
the entire body (his own) and the landscapification of all milieus (his own),
but he composed all of the elementary faces and had every divergence at his
disposal: Christ-athlete at the fair, Christ-Mannerist queer, Christ-Negro,
or at least a Black Virgin at the edge of the wall. The most prodigious
strokes of madness appear on canvas under the auspices of the Catholic
code. A single example chosen from many [Giotto, The Life of St. Francis,
scene XII, The Transfiguration—Trans.]: against the white background of
the landscape and the black-blue hole of the sky, the crucified
Christ-turned-kite-machine sends stigmata to Saint Francis by rays; the
stigmata effect the facialization of the body of the saint, in the image of the
body of Christ; but the rays carrying the stigmata to the saint are also the
strings Francis uses to pull the divine kite. It was under the sign of the
cross

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that people learned to steer the face and processes of facialization in all

directions.

Information theory takes as its point of departure a homogeneous set of

ready-made signifying messages that are already functioning as elements

in biunivocal relationships, or the elements of which are biunivocally

organized between messages. Second, the picking of a combination

depends on a certain number of subjective binary choices that increase pro-

portionally to the number of elements. But the problem is that all of this

biunivocalization and binarization (which is not just the result of an

increase in calculating skills, as some say) assumes the deployment of a wall

or screen, the installation of a central computing hole without which no

message would be discernible and no choice could be implemented. The

black hole/white wall system must already have gridded all of space and

outlined its arborescences or dichotomies for those of signifier and

subjectification even to be conceivable. The mixed semiotic of signifiance

and subjectification has an exceptional need to be protected from any

intrusion from the outside. In fact, there must not be any exterior: no

nomad machine, no primitive poly vocality must spring up, with their com-

binations of heterogeneous substances of expression. Translatability of

any kind requires a single substance of expression. One can constitute sig-

nifying chains operating with deterritorialized, digitalized, discrete ele-

ments only if there is a semiological screen available, a wall to protect

them. One can make subjective choices between two chains or at each point

in a chain only if no outside tempest sweeps away the chains and subjects.

One can form a web of subjectivities only if one possesses a central eye, a

black hole capturing everything that would exceed or transform either the

assigned affects or the dominant significations. Moreover, it is absurd to

believe that language as such can convey a message. A language is always

embedded in the faces that announce its statements and ballast them in

relation to the signifiers in progress and subjects concerned. Choices are

guided by faces, elements are organized around faces: a common grammar

is never separable from a facial education. The face is a veritable mega-

phone. Thus not only must the abstract machine of faciality provide a pro-

tective screen and a computing black hole; in addition, the faces it

produces draw all kinds of arborescences and dichotomies without which

the signifying and the subjective would not be able to make the arbor-

escences and dichotomies function that fall within their purview in lan-

guage. Doubtless, the binarities and biunivocalities of the face are not the

same as those of language, of its elements and subjects. There is no resem-

blance between them. But the former subtend the latter. When the faciality

machine translates formed contents of whatever kind into a single sub-

stance of expression, it already subjugates them to the exclusive form of

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YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY

signifying and subjective expression. It carries out the prior gridding that

makes it possible for the signifying elements to become discernible, and for

the subjective choices to be implemented. The faciality machine is not an

annex to the signifier and the subject; rather, it is subjacent (connexe) to

them and is their condition of possibility. Facial biunivocalities and

bina-rities double the others; facial redundancies are in redundancy with

signifying and subjective redundancies. It is precisely because the face

depends on an abstract machine that it does not assume a preexistent

subject or signifier; but it is subjacent to them and provides the substance

necessary to them. What chooses the faces is not a subject, as in the

Szondi test; it is faces that choose their subjects. What interprets the

black blotch/white hole figure, or the white page/black hole, is not a

signifier, as in the Rorschach test; it is that figure which programs the

signifiers.

We have made some progress toward answering the question of what

triggers the abstract machine of faciality, for it is not in operation all the

time or in just any social formation. Certain social formations need face,

and also landscape.

There is a whole history behind it. At very different

dates, there occurred a generalized collapse of all of the heterogeneous,

polyvocal, primitive semiotics in favor of a semiotic of signifiance and

subjectification. Whatever the differences between signifiance and

subjec-tification, whichever prevails over the other in this case or that,

whatever the varying figures assumed by their de facto mixtures—they

have it in common to crush all polyvocality, set up language as a form of

exclusive expression, and operate by signifying biunivocalization and

subjective binarization. The superlinearity proper to language is no

longer coordinated with multidimensional figures: it now flattens out all

volumes and subordinates all lines. Is it by chance that linguistics always,

and very quickly, encounters the problem of homonymy, or ambiguous

statements that it then subjects to a set of binary reductions? More

generally, linguistics can tolerate no poly vocality or rhizome traits: a child

who runs around, plays, dances, and draws cannot concentrate attention

on language and writing, and will never be a good subject. In short, the

new semiotic needs systematically to destroy the whole range of primitive

semiotic systems, even if it retains some of their debris in well-defined

enclosures.

However, there is more to the picture than semiotic systems waging war

on one another armed only with their own weapons. Very specific assem-
blages of power impose signifiance and subjectification as their determinate

form of expression, in reciprocal presupposition with new contents: there

is no signifiance without a despotic assemblage, no subjectification with-

out an authoritarian assemblage, and no mixture between the two without

assemblages of power that act through signifiers and act upon souls and

subjects. It is these assemblages, these despotic or authoritarian forma-

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tions, that give the new semiotic system the means of its imperialism, in

other words, the means both to crush the other semiotics and protect itself

against any threat from outside. A concerted effort is made to do away with

the body and corporeal coordinates through which the multidimensional

or polyvocal semiotics operated. Bodies are disciplined, corporeality dis-

mantled, becomings-animal hounded out, deterritorialization pushed to a

new threshold—a jump is made from the organic strata to the strata of

signifiance and subjectification. A single substance of expression is pro-

duced. The white wall/black hole system is constructed, or rather the

abstract machine is triggered that must allow and ensure the almightiness

of the signifier as well as the autonomy of the subject. You will be pinned to

the white wall and stuffed in the black hole. This machine is called the

faciality machine because it is the social production of face, because it per-

forms the facialization of the entire body and all its surroundings and

objects, and the landscapification of all worlds and milieus. The deter-

ritorialization of the body implies a reterritorialization on the face; the

decoding of the body implies an overcoding by the face; the collapse of cor-

poreal coordinates or milieus implies the constitution of a landscape. The

semiotic of the signifier and the subjective never operates through bodies.

It is absurd to claim to relate the signifier to the body. At any rate it can be

related only to a body that has already been entirely facialized. The differ-

ence between our uniforms and clothes and primitive paintings and garb is

that the former effect a facialization of the body, with buttons for black

holes against the white wall of the material. Even the mask assumes a new

function here, the exact opposite of its old one. For there is no unitary func-

tion of the mask, except a negative one (in no case does the mask serve to

dissimulate, to hide, even while showing or revealing). Either the mask

assures the head's belonging to the body, its becoming-animal, as was the

case in primitive societies. Or, as is the case now, the mask assures the erec-

tion, the construction of the face, the facialization of the head and the

body: the mask is now the face itself, the abstraction or operation of the

face. The inhumanity of the face. Never does the face assume a prior

signifier or subject. The order is totally different: despotic and authoritar-

ian concrete assemblage of power —► triggering of the abstract machine of

faciality, white wall/black hole —> installation of the new semiotic of

signifiance and subjectification on that holey surface. That is why we have

been addressing just two problems exclusively: the relation of the face to

the abstract machine that produces it, and the relation of the face to the

assemblages of power that require that social production. The face is a

politics.

Of course, we have already seen that signifiance and subjectification are

semiotic systems that are entirely distinct in their principles and have

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different regimes (circular irradiation versus segmentary linearity) and

different apparatuses of power (despotic generalized slavery versus author-

itarian contract-proceeding). Neither begins with Christ, or the White

Man as Christian universal: there are Indian, African, and Asiatic despotic

formations of signifiance; the authoritarian process of subjectification

appears most purely in the destiny of the Jewish people. But however dif-

ferent these semiotics are, they still form a de facto mix, and it is at the level

of this mixture that they assert their imperialism, in other words, their

common endeavor to crush all other semiotics. There is no signifiance that

does not harbor the seeds of subjectivity; there is no subjectification that

does not drag with it remnants of signifier. If the signifier bounces above all

off a wall, if subjectivity spins above all toward a hole, then we must say that

the wall of the signifier already includes holes and the black hole of subjec-

tivity already carries scraps of wall. The mix, therefore, has a solid founda-

tion in the indissociable white wall/black hole machine, and the two

semiotics intermingle through intersection, splicing, and the plugging of

one into the other, as with the "Hebrew and the Pharaoh." But there is more

because the nature of the mixtures may vary greatly. If it is possible to

assign the faciality machine a date—the year zero of Christ and the histori-

cal development of the White Man—it is because that is when the mixture

ceased to be a splicing or an intertwining, becoming a total

interpene-tration in which each element suffuses the other like drops of

red-black wine in white water. Our semiotic of modern White Men, the

semiotic of capitalism, has attained this state of mixture in which

signifiance and subjectification effectively interpenetrate. Thus it is in

this semiotic that faciality, or the white wall/black hole system, assumes

its full scope. We must, however, assess the states of mixture and the

varying proportions of the elements. Whether in the Christian or

pre-Christian state, one element may dominate another, one may be more

or less powerful than the other. We are thus led to define limit-faces,

which are different from both the facial units and the degrees of facial

divergence previously defined.

1. The black hole is on the white wall. It is not a unit, since the black hole

is in constant movement on the wall and operates by binarization. Two

black holes, four black holes, n black holes distribute themselves like eyes.

Faciality is always a multiplicity. The landscape will be populated with eyes

or black holes, as in an Ernst painting, or a drawing by Aloi'se or Wolfli. Cir-

cles are drawn around a hole on the white wall; an eye can be placed in each

of the circles. We can even propose the following law: the more circles there

are around a hole, the more the bordering effect acts to increase the surface

over which the hole slides and to give that surface a force of capture. Per-

haps the purest case is to be found in popular Ethiopian scrolls represent-

ing demons: on the white surface of the parchment, two black holes are

YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY □ 183

drawn, or an outline of round or rectangular faces; but the black holes

spread and reproduce, they enter into redundancy, and each time a secon-

dary circle is drawn, a new black hole is constituted, an eye is put in it.'

effect of capturing a surface that becomes more enclosed the more it

expands. This is the signifying despotic face and the multiplication proper

to it, its proliferation, its redundancy of frequency. A multiplication of

eyes. The despot or his representatives are everywhere. This is the face as

seen from the front, by a subject who does not so much see as get snapped

up by black holes. This is a figure of destiny, terrestrial destiny, objective

signifying destiny. The close-up in film knows this figure well: the Griffith

close-up of a face, an element of a face or a facialized object, which then

assumes an anticipatory temporal value (the hands of the clock fore-

shadow something).

Proliferation of Eyes By Multiplication of Border

Terrestrial Signifying Despotic Face

2. Now, on the contrary, the white wall has unraveled, becoming a silver

thread moving toward the black hole. One black hole "crests" all the other

black holes, all of the eyes and faces, while the landscape becomes a thread

184 □

YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY

whose far end coils around the hole. It is still a multiplicity but constitutes a

different figure of destiny: reflexive, passional, subjective destiny. It is the
maritime face or landscape: it follows the line separating the sky from the

waters, or the land from the waters. This authoritarian face is in profile and

spins toward the black hole. Or else there are two faces facing each other,

but in profile to the observer, and their union is already marked by a limit-

less separation. Or else the faces turn away from each other, swept away by

betrayal. Tristan, Isolde, Isolde, Tristan, in the boat carrying them to the

black hole of betrayal and death. A faciality of consciousness and passion, a

redundancy of resonance and coupling. This time, the effect of the close-up

is no longer to expand a surface while simultaneously closing it off; its only

function is to have an anticipatory temporal value. It marks the origin of a

scale of intensity, or is part of that scale; the closer the faces get to the black

hole as termination point, the more the close-up heats the line they follow.

Eisenstein's close-ups versus Griffith's (the intensive heightening of

shame, or anger, in the close-ups in Potemkin).

Here again, it is clear that

any combination is possible between the two limit-figures of the face. In

Pabst's Lulu, the despotic face of the fallen Lulu is associated with the

image of a bread knife, which has the anticipatory value of foreshadowing

the murder; but the authoritarian face of Jack the Ripper also ascends a

whole scale of intensities leading to the knife and Lulu's murder.

More generally, we may note characteristics common to the two

limit-figures. First, although the white wall, the broad cheeks, is the

substantial element of the signifier, and the black hole the reflexive element

of subjectivity, they always go together. But in one of two modes: either

the black holes distribute themselves and multiply on the white wall, or

the wall, reduced to its crest or horizon thread, hurtles toward a black

hole that crests them all. There is no wall without black holes, and no

black hole without a wall. Second, in both cases the black hole is

necessarily surrounded by a border, or even bordered more than once: the

effect of this border is either to expand the surface of the wall or to intensify

the line. The black hole is never in the eyes (pupil); it is always inside the

border, and the eyes are always inside the hole: dead eyes, which see all the

better for being in a black hole.

These common characteristics do not

preclude the existence of a limit-difference between the two figures of the

face, and proportions according to which first one then the other

dominates in the mixed semiotic. The terrestrial signifying despotic face,

the maritime subjective passional authoritarian face (the desert can also be

a sea of land). Two figures of destiny, two states of the faciality machine.

Jean Paris has clearly shown how these poles operate in painting, the pole

of the despotic Christ and that of the passional Christ: on the one hand,

the face of Christ seen from the front, as in a Byzantine mosaic, with the

black hole of the eyes

YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY D 185

against a gold background, all depth projected forward; and on the other

hand, faces that cross glances and turned away from each other, seen

half-turned or in profile, as in a quattrocento painting, their sidelong

glances drawing multiple lines, integrating depth into the painting itself

(arbitrary examples of transition and mixture can be cited, such a

Duccio's Calling of Saint Peter and Saint Andrew, against the background of

an aquatic landscape; the second formula has already overtaken Christ and

the first fisherman, while the second fisherman remains within the Byzantine

code).

Celebatory Machine

Maritime Subjective Authoritarian Face (after Tristan and Isolde)

Swann's Love: Proust was able to make the face, landscape, painting,

music, etc., resonate together. Three moments in the story of Swann and

Odette. First, a whole signifying mechanism is set up. The face of Odette

with her broad white or yellow cheeks, and her eyes as black hoes. But this

face continually refers back to other things, also arrayed on the wall. That is

Swann's aetheticism, his amateurism: a thing must always recall some-

thing else, in a network of interpretations under the sign of the signifier.

A face refers back to a landscape. A face must "recall" a painting, or a

Coupled Machine

Complex Machine

1. Musicality Line

2. Picturality Line

3. Landscapity Line

4. Faciality Line

5. Consciousness Line

6. Passion Line

Etc.

186 □

YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY

fragment of a painting. A piece of music must let fall a little phrase that

connects with Odette's face, to the point that the little phrase becomes only

a signal. The white wall becomes populous, the black holes are arrayed.

This entire mechanism of signifiance, with its referral of interpretations,

prepares the way for the second, passional subjective, moment, during

which Swann's jealousy, querulous delusion, and erotomania develop.

Now Odette's face races down a line hurtling toward a single black hole,

that of Swann's Passion. The other lines, of landscapity, picturality, and

musicality, also rush toward this catatonic hole and coil around it, border-

ing it several times.

But in the third moment, at the end of his long passion, Swann attends a

reception where he sees the faces of the servants and guests disaggregate

into autonomous aesthetic traits, as if the line of picturality regained its

independence, both beyond the wall and outside the black hole. Then

Vinteuil's little phrase regains its transcendence and renews its connection

with a still more intense, asignifying, and asubjective line of pure musi-

cality. And Swann knows that he no longer loves Odette and, above all, that

Odette will never again love him.

Was this salvation through art necessary? For neither Swann nor Proust

was saved. Was it necessary to break through the wall and out of the hole in
this way, by renouncing love? Was not that love rotten from the start, made

of signifiance and jealousy? Was it possible to do anything else, considering

Odette's mediocrity and Swann's aestheticism? In a way, the madeleine is

the same story. The narrator munches his madeleine: redundancy, the

black hole of involuntary memory. How can he get out of that? And it is,

above all, something one has to get out of, escape from. Proust knows that

quite well, even if his commentators do not. But the way he gets out is

through art, uniquely through art.

How do you get out of the black hole? How do you break through the

wall? How do you dismantle the face? Whatever genius there may be in the

French novel, that is not its affair. It is too concerned with measuring the

wall, or even with building it, with plumbing the depths of black holes and

composing faces. The French novel is profoundly pessimistic and idealis-

tic, "critical of life rather than creative of life." It stuffs its characters down

the hole and bounces them off the wall. It can only conceive of organized

voyages, and of salvation only through art, a still Catholic salvation, in

other words, salvation through eternity. It spends its time plotting points

instead of drawing lines, active lines of flight or of positive

deterritori-alization. The Anglo-American novel is totally different. "To

get away. To get away, out!... To cross a horizon .. ."

From Hardy to

Lawrence, from Melville to Miller, the same cry rings out: Go across, get

out, break through, make a beeline, don't get stuck on a point. Find the line

of separation, fol-

YEAR

ZERO: FACIALITY □ 187

low it or create it, to the point of treachery. That is why their relationship to

other civilizations, to the Orient or South America, and also to drugs and

voyages in place, is entirely different from that of the French. They know

how difficult it is to get out of the black hole of subjectivity, of conscious-

ness and memory, of the couple and conjugality. How tempting it is to let

yourself get caught, to lull yourself into it, to latch back onto aface. "[Being]

locked away in the black hole. . . gave her a molten copperish glow, the

words coming out of her mouth like lava, her flesh clutching ravenously for

a hold, a perch on something solid and substantial, something in which to

reintegrate and repose for a few moments. ... At first I mistook it for pas-

sion, for ecstasy. ... I thought I had found a living volcano, a female

Vesuvius. I never thought I had found a human ship going down in an

ocean of despair, in a Sargasso of impotence. Now I think of that black star

gleaming through the hole in the ceiling, that fixed star which hung above

our conjugal cell, more fixed, more remote than the Absolute, and I know it

was her, emptied of all that was properly herself: a dead black sun without

aspect."

A copperish glow like the face at the bottom of a black hole. The

point is to get out of it, not in art, in other words, in spirit, but in life, in real

life. Don't take away my power to love. These English and American authors

also know how hard it is to break through the wall of the signifier. Many

people have tried since Christ, beginning with Christ. But Christ himself

botched the crossing, the jump, he bounced off the wall. "As if by a great

recoil, this negative backwash rolled up and stayed his death. The whole

negative impulse of humanity seemed to coil up into a monstrous inert

mass to create the human integer, the figure one, one and indivisible"—the

Face.

Cross the wall, the Chinese perhaps, but at what price? At the price

of a becoming-animal, a becoming-flower or rock, and beyond that a strange
becoming-imperceptible, a becoming-hard now one with loving.

It is a

question of speed, even if the movement is in place. Is this also to dismantle

the face, or as Miller says, no longer to look at or into the eyes but to swim

through them, to close your own eyes and make your body a beam of light

moving at ever-increasing speed? Of course, this requires all the resources

of art, and art of the highest kind. It requires a whole line of writing,

picturality, musicality... For it is through writing that you become animal,

it is through color that you become imperceptible, it is through music that

you become hard and memoryless, simultaneously animal and impercepti-

ble: in love. But art is never an end in itself; it is only a tool for blazing life

lines, in other words, all of those real becomings that are not produced only
in art, and all of those active escapes that do not consist in fleeing into art,

taking refuge in art, and all of those positive deterritorializations that

never reterritorialize on art, but instead sweep it away with them toward

the realms of the asignifying, asubjective, and faceless.

188 □

YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY

Dismantling the face is no mean affair. Madness is a definite danger: Is it

by chance that schizos lose their sense of the face, their own and others',

their sense of the landscape, and the sense of language and its dominant sig-

nifications all at the same time? The organization of the face is a strong

one. We could say that the face holds within its rectangle or circle a whole

set of traits, faciality traits, which it subsumes and places at the service of

signifiance and subjectification. What is a tic? It is precisely the continu-

ally refought battle between a faciality trait that tries to escape the sover-

eign organization of the face and the face itself, which clamps back down

on the trait, takes hold of it again, blocks its line of flight, and reimposes its

organization upon it. (There is a medical distinction between the clonic or

convulsive tic and the tonic or spasmodic tic; perhaps we can say that in the

first case the faciality trait that is trying to escape has the upper hand,

whereas in the second case the facial organization that is trying to clamp

back down or immobilize itself has the upper hand.) But if dismantling the

face is a major affair, it is because it is not simply a question of tics, or an

amateur's or aesthete's adventure. If the face is a politics, dismantling the

face is also a politics involving real becomings, an entire

becoming-clandestine. Dismantling the face is the same as breaking

through the wall of the signifier and getting out of the black hole of

subjectivity. Here, the program, the slogan, of schizoanalysis is: Find your

black holes and white walls, know them, know your faces; it is the only way

you will be able to dismantle them and draw your lines of flight.

It is time once again to multiply practical warnings. First, it is never a

question of a return to ... It is not a question of "returning" to the

presignifying and presubjective semiotics of primitive peoples. We will

always be failures at playing African or Indian, even Chinese, and no voy-

age to the South Seas, however arduous, will allow us to cross the wall, get

out of the hole, or lose our face. We will never succeed in making ourselves a

new primitive head and body, human, spiritual, and faceless. It would only

be taking more photos and bouncing off the wall again. We will always find

ourselves reterritorialized again. O my little desert island, on you I am in

the Closerie des Lilas again, O my deep ocean, you reflect the lake in the

Bois de Boulogne, O little phrase of Vinteuil, you recall a sweet moment.

These are Eastern physical and spiritual exercises, but for a couple, like a

conjugal bed tucked with a Chinese sheet: you did do your exercises today,

didn't you? Lawrence has only one grudge against Melville: he knew better

than anyone how to get across the face, the eyes and horizon, the wall and

hole, but he mistook that crossing, that creative line, for an "impossible

return," a return to the savages in Typee, for a way of staying an artist and

hating life, of maintaining a nostalgia for the Home Country. ("He ever

pined for Home and Mother, the two things he had run away from as far as

YEAR

ZERO: FACIALITY □ 189

ships would carry him.... Melville came home to face out the rest of his

life.... He refused life. But he stuck to his ideal of perfect relationship, pos-

sible perfect love.... A truly perfect relationship is one in which each party

leaves great tracts unknown in the other party.. . . Melville was, at the core,

a mystic and an idealist.... And he stuck to his ideal guns. I abandon mine.

I say, let the old guns rot. Get new ones, and shoot straight.")

23,

We can't turn back. Only neurotics, or, as Lawrence says, "renegades,"

deceivers, attempt a regression. The white wall of the signifier, the black

hole of subjectivity, and the facial machine are impasses, the measure of

our submissions and subjections; but we are born into them, and it is there

we must stand battle. Not in the sense of a necessary stage, but in the sense

of a tool for which a new use must be invented. Only across the wall of the

signifier can you run lines of asignifiance that void all memory, all return,

all possible signification and interpretation. Only in the black hole of

subjective consciousness and passion do you discover the transformed,

heated, captured particles you must relaunch for a nonsubjective, living

love in which each party connects with unknown tracts in the other without

entering or conquering them, in which the lines composed are broken lines.

Only on your face and at the bottom of your black hole and upon your white

wall will you be able to set faciality traits free like birds, not in order to

return to a primitive head, but to invent the combinations by which those

traits connect with landscapity traits that have themselves been freed from

the landscape and with traits of picturality and musicality that have also

been freed from their respective codes. With what joy the painters used the

face of Christ himself, taking it in every sense and direction; and it was not

simply the joy of a desire to paint, but the joy of all desires. Is it possible to

tell, when the knight of the courtly novel is in his catatonic state, whether

he is deep in his black hole or already astride the particles that will carry

him out of it to begin a new journey? Lawrence, who has been compared to

Lancelot, writes: "To be alone, mindless and memoryless beside the sea...

As alone and as absent and as present as an aboriginal dark on the sand in

the sun ... Far off, far off, as if he had landed on another planet, as a man

might after death. . . The landscape?—he cared not a thing about the land-

scape. . . . Humanity?—there was none. Thought?—fallen like a stone into

the sea. The great, the glamorous past?—worn thin, frail, like a frail trans-

lucent film of shell thrown up on the shore."

The uncertain moment at

which the white wall/black hole, black point/white shore system, as on a

Japanese print, itself becomes one with the act of leaving it, breaking away

from and crossing through it.

We have seen that the abstract machine has two very different states:

sometimes it is taken up in strata where it brings about

deterritorial-izations that are merely relative, or deterritorializations that

are absolute

190 □

YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY

but remain negative; sometimes it is developed on a plane of consistency

giving it a "diagrammatic" function, a positive value of

deterritorial-ization, the ability to form new abstract machines. Sometimes

the abstract machine, as the faciality machine, forces flows into

signifiances and subjectifications, into knots of aborescence and holes of

abolition; sometimes, to the extent that it performs a veritable

"defacialization," it frees something like probe-heads {fetes chercheuses,

guidance devices) that dismantle the strata in their wake, break through the

walls of signifiance, pour out of the holes of subjectivity, fell trees in favor

of veritable rhizomes, and steer the flows down lines of positive

deterritorializaton or creative flight. There are no more concentrically

organized strata, no more black holes around which lines coil to form

borders, no more walls to which dichotomies, binarities, and bipolar

values cling. There is no more face to be in redundancy with a landscape,

painting, or little phrase of music, each perpetually bringing the other to

mind, on the unified surface of the wall or the central swirl of the black

hole. Each freed faciality trait forms a rhizome with a freed trait of

landscapity, picturality, or musicality. This is not a collection of

part-objects but a living block, a connecting of stems by which the traits

of a face enter a real multiplicity or diagram with a trait of an unknown

landscape, a trait of painting or music that is thereby effectively produced,

created, according to quanta of absolute, positive

deterritori-alization—not evoked or recalled according to systems of

reterritorializa-tion. A wasp trait and an orchid trait. Quanta marking so

many mutations of abstract machines, each of which operates as a

function of the other. Thus opens a rhizomatic realm of possibility

effecting the potentialization of the possible, as opposed to arborescent

possibility, which marks a closure, an impotence.

The face, what a horror. It is naturally a lunar landscape, with its pores,

planes, matts, bright colors, whiteness, and holes: there is no need for a

close-up to make it inhuman; it is naturally a close-up, and naturally

inhuman, a monstrous hood. Necessarily so because it is produced by a

machine and in order to meet the requirements of the special apparatus of

power that triggers the machine and takes deterritorialization to the abso-

lute while keeping it negative. Earlier, when we contrasted the primitive,

spiritual, human head with the inhuman face, we were falling victim to a

nostalgia for a return or regression. In truth, there are only inhumanities,

humans are made exclusively of inhumanities, but very different ones, of

very different natures and speeds. Primitive inhumanity, prefacial inhu-

manity, has all the polyvocality of a semiotic in which the head is a part of

the body, a body that is already deterritorialized relatively and plugged

into becomings-spiritual/animal. Beyond the face lies an altogether differ-

ent inhumanity: no longer that of the primitive head, but of "probe-heads";

8. 1874: Three Novellas, or

'What Happened?"

It is not very difficult to determine the essence of the "novella" as a literary

genre: Everything is organized around the question, "What happened?

Whatever could have happened?" The tale is the opposite of the novella,

because it is an altogether different question that the reader asks with bated

breath: What is going to happen? Something is always going to happen,

come to pass. Something always happens in the novel also, but the novel

integrates elements of the novella and the tale into the variation of its

perpetual living present (duration). The detective novel is a particularly

hybrid genre in this respect, since most often the something = Xthat has

happened is on the order of a murder or theft, but exactly what it is that has

happened remains to be discovered, and in the present determined by the

model detective. Yet it would be an error to reduce these different aspects

to the three dimensions of time. Something happened, something is going

to happen, can designate a past so immediate, a future so near, that they are

one (as Husserl would say) with retentions and protentions of the present

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1874:

THREE NOVELLAS, OR "WHAT HAPPENED?" □ 193

itself. Nevertheless, the distinction is legitimate, in view of the different

movements that animate the present, are contemporaneous with it: One

moves with it, another already casts it into the past from the moment it is

present (novella), while another simultaneously draws it into the future

(tale). We are lucky to have treatments of the same subject by a tale writer

and a novella writer: two lovers, one of whom dies suddenly in the other's

room. In Maupassant's tale, "Une ruse" (An artifice), everything revolves

around these questions: What is going to happen? How will the survivor

extricate himself from the situation? What will the third party-savior, in

this case a doctor, think of? In Barbey d'Aurevilly's novella, "Le rideau

cramoisi" (The crimson curtain), everything revolves around: Something

happened, but what? That is the question, not only because it is really not

known what the cold young woman just died from, but also because it will

never be known why she gave herself to the petty officer, or how the third

party-savior, here the colonel of the regiment, was able to arrange things.

should not be thought that it is easier to leave things open-ended: for there

to be something that has happened that we will never know about, or even

several things in a row, requires no less minute attention and precision than

the contrary case, when the author must invent the details of what will need

to be known. You will never know what just happened, or you will always

know what is going to happen: these are the reasons for the reader's two

bated breaths, in the novella and the tale, respectively, and they are two

ways in which the living present is divided at every instant. In the novella,

we do not wait for something to happen, we expect something to have just

happened. The novella is a last novella, whereas the tale is a first tale. The

"presence" of the tale writer is completely different from that of the novella

writer (and both are different from that of the novelist). Let us not dwell too

much on the dimensions of time: the novella has little to do with a memory

of the past or an act of reflection; quite to the contrary, it plays upon a fun-

damental forgetting. It evolves in the element of "what happened" because

it places us in a relation with something unknowable and imperceptible

(and not the other way around: it is not because it speaks of a past about

which it can no longer provide us knowledge). It may even be that nothing

has happened, but it is precisely that nothing that makes us say, Whatever

could have happened to make me forget where I put my keys, or whether I

mailed that letter, etc.? What little blood vessel in my brain could have rup-

tured? What is this nothing that makes something happen? The novella has

a fundamental relation to secrecy (not with a secret matter or object to be

discovered, but with the form of the secret, which remains impenetrable),

whereas the tale has a relation to discovery (the form of discovery, indepen-

dent of what can be discovered). The novella also enacts postures of the

body and mind that are like folds or envelopments, whereas the tale puts

194 □

1874: THREE NOVELLAS, OR "WHAT HAPPENED?"

into play attitudes or positions that are like unfoldings and developments,

however unexpected. Barbey has an evident fondness for body posture, in

other words, states of the body when it is surprised by something that just

happened. In the preface to the Diaboliques, Barbey even suggests that

there is a diabolism of body postures, a sexuality, pornography, and

scatol-ogy of postures quite different from those that also, and

simultaneously, mark body attitudes or positions. Posture is like inverse

suspense. Thus it is not a question of saying that the novella relates to the

past and the tale to the future; what we should say instead is that the novella

relates, in the present itself, to the formal dimension of something that has

happened, even if that something is nothing or remains unknowable.

Similarly, one should not try to make the distinction between the novella

and the tale coincide with categories such as the fantastic, the fabulous,

etc.; that is another problem, there is no reason why it should overlap. The

links of the novella are: What happened? (the modality or expression),

Secrecy (the form), Body Posture (the content).

Take Fitzgerald. He is a tale and novella writer of genius. He is a novella

writer when he asks himself, Whatever could have happened for things to
have come to this? He is the only one who has been able to carry this ques-

tion to such a point of intensity. It is not a question of memory, reflection,

old age, or fatigue, whereas the tale would deal with childhood, action, or

impulse. Yet it is true that Fitzgerald only asks himself the question of the

novella writer when he is personally worn-out, fatigued, sick, or even worse

off. But once again, there is not necessarily a connection: it can also be a

question of vigor, or love. It still is, even in desperate conditions. It is better

to think of it as an affair of perception: you enter a room and perceive

something as already there, as just having happened, even though it has not

yet been done. Or you know that what is in the process of happening is hap-

pening for the last time, it's already over with. You hear an "I love you" you

know is the last one. Perceptual semiotics. God, whatever could have hap-

pened, even though everything is and remains imperceptible, and in order

for everything to be and remain imperceptible forever?

Not only is there a specificity of the novella, but there is also a specific

way in which the novella treats a universal matter. For we are made of lines.

We are not only referring to lines of writing. Lines of writing conjugate with

other lines, life lines, lines of luck or misfortune, lines productive of the

variation of the line of writing itself, lines that are between the lines of writ-

ing. Perhaps the novella has its own way of giving rise to and combining

these lines, which nonetheless belong to everyone and every genre.

Vladimir Propp has said, with great solemnity, that the folktale must be

defined in terms of external and internal movements that it qualifies, for-

malizes, and combines in its own specific way.

We would like to demon-

1874:

THREE NOVELLAS, OR "WHAT HAPPENED?" D 195

strate that the novella is defined by living lines, flesh lines, about which it

brings a special revelation. Marcel Arland is correct to say that the novella

"is nothing but pure lines right down to the nuances, and nothing but the

pure and conscious power of the word."

First Novella: "In the Cage," Henry James

The heroine, a young telegrapher, leads a very clear-cut, calculated life pro-

ceeding by delimited segments: the telegrams she takes one after the other,

day after day; the people to whom she sends the telegrams; their social class

and the different ways they use telegraphy; the words to be counted. More-

over, her telegraphist's cage is like a contiguous segment to the grocery

store next door, where her fiance works. Contiguity of territories. And the

fiance is constantly plotting out their future, work, vacations, house. Here,

as for all of us, there is a line of rigid segmentarity on which everything

seems calculable and foreseen, the beginning and end of a segment, the pas-

sage from one segment to another. Our lives are made like that: Not only

are the great molar aggregates segmented (States, institutions, classes), but

so are people as elements of an aggregate, as are feelings as relations

between people; they are segmented, not in such a way as to disturb or dis-

perse, but on the contrary to ensure and control the identity of each agency,

including personal identity. The fiance can say to the young woman, Even

though there are differences between our segments, we have the same tastes

and we are alike. I am a man, you are a woman; you are a telegraphist, I am a

grocer; you count words, I weigh things; our segments fit together, conju-

gate. Conjugality. A whole interplay of well-determined, well-planned ter-

ritories. They have a future but no becoming. This is the first life line, the
molar or rigid line of segmentarity; in no sense is it dead, for it occupies and

pervades our life, and always seems to prevail in the end. It even includes

much tenderness and love. It would be too easy to say, "This is a bad line,"

for you find it everywhere, and in all the other lines.

A rich couple comes into the post office and reveals to the young woman,

or at least confirms, the existence of another life: coded, multiple tele-

grams, signed with pseudonyms. It is hard to tell who is who anymore, or

what anything means. Instead of a rigid line composed of well-determined

segments, telegraphy now forms a supple flow marked by quanta that are

like so many little segmentations-in-progress grasped at the moment of

their birth, as on a moonbeam, or on an intensive scale. Thanks to her "pro-

digious talent for interpretation," the young woman grasps that the man

has a secret that has placed him in danger, deeper and deeper in danger, in a

dangerous posture. It does not just have to do with his love relations with

the woman. James has reached the stage in his work when it is no longer the

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1874: THREE NOVELLAS, OR "WHAT HAPPENED?"

matter of the secret that interests him, even if he has succeeded in render-
ing it entirely banal and unimportant. Now what counts is the form of the
secret; the matter no longer even has to be discovered (we never find out,
there are several possibilities, there is an objective indetermination, a kind
of molecularization of the secret). In relation to this man, directly with
him, the young telegraphist develops a strange passional complicity, a
whole intense molecular life that does not even enter into rivalry with the
life she leads with her fiance. What has happened, whatever could have
happened? This life, however, is not in her head, it is not imaginary. Rather,
we should say that there are two politics involved, as the young woman sug-
gests in a remarkable conversation with her fiance: a macropohtics and a
micropolitics that do not envision classes, sexes, people, or feelings in at all
the same way. Or again, there are two very different types of relations:
intrinsic relations of couples involving well-determined aggregates or ele-
ments (social classes, men and women, this or that particular person), and
less localizable relations that are always external to themselves and instead
concern flows and particles eluding those classes, sexes, and persons. Why
are the latter relations of doubles rather than of couples? "She was literally
afraid of the alternate self who might be waiting outside. He might be wait-
ing; it was he who was her alternate self, and of him she was afraid."

In any

case, this line is very different from the previous one; it is a line of molecu-
lar or supple segmentation the segments of which are like quanta of
deterritorialization. It is on this line that a present is defined whose very
form is the form of something that has already happened, however close
you might be to it, since the ungraspable matter of that something is
entirely molecularized, traveling at speeds beyond the ordinary thresholds
of perception. Yet we will not say that it is necessarily better.

There is no question that the two lines are constantly interfering, react-

ing upon each other, introducing into each other either a current of supple-
ness or a point of rigidity. Nathalie Sarraute, in her essay on the novel,
praises English novelists, not only for discovering (as did Proust and
Dostoyevsky) the great movements, territories, and points of the uncon-
scious that allow us to regain time or revive the past, but also for
inopportunely following these molecular lines, simultaneously present and
imperceptible. She shows that dialogue or conversation does indeed com-
ply with the breaks of a fixed segmentarity, with vast movements of regu-
lated distribution corresponding to the attitudes and positions of each of
us; but also that they are run through and swept up by micromovements,
fine segmentations distributed in an entirely different way, unfindable par-
ticles of an anonymous matter, tiny cracks and postures operating by dif-
ferent agencies even in the unconscious, secret lines of disorientation or

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THREE NOVELLAS, OR "WHAT HAPPENED?" □ 197

deterritorialization: as she puts it, a whole subconversation within conver-

sation, in other words, a micropolitics of conversation.

Then James's heroine reaches a sort of maximum quantum in her sup-

ple segmentarity or line of flow beyond which she cannot go (even if she

wanted to, there is no going further). There is a danger that these vibrations

traversing us may be aggravated beyond our endurance. What happened?

The molecular relation between the telegraphist and the telegraph sender

dissolved in the form of the secret—because nothing happened. Each of

them is propelled toward a rigid segmentarity: he will marry the

now-widowed lady, she will marry her fiance. And yet everything has

changed. She has reached something like a new line, a third type, a kind

of line of flight that is just as real as the others even if it occurs in place:

this line no longer tolerates segments; rather, it is like an exploding of the

two segmentary series. She has broken through the wall, she has gotten out

of the black holes. She has attained a kind of absolute deterritorialization.

"She ended up knowing so much that she could no longer interpret any-

thing. There were no longer shadows to help her see more clearly, only
glare."

You cannot go further in life than this sentence by James. The

nature of the secret has changed once again. Undoubtedly, the secret

always has to do with love, and sexuality. But previously it was either only a

hidden matter given in the past (the better hidden the more ordinary it

was), and we did not exactly know what form to give it: See, I am bending

under the burden of my secret, see what mystery resides within me. It was a

way of seeming interesting, what D. H. Lawrence called "the dirty little

secret," my Oedipus, in a way. Or else the secret became the form of some-

thing whose matter was molecularized, imperceptible, unassignable: not a

given of the past but the ungivable "What happened?" But on this third line

there is no longer even any form—nothing but a pure abstract line. It is

because we no longer have anything to hide that we can no longer be appre-

hended. To become imperceptible oneself, to have dismantled love in

order to become capable of loving. To have dismantled one's self in order

finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A

clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage. To become like everybody

else; but this, precisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be

nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray. As

Kierkegaard says, nothing distinguishes the knight of the faith from a bour-

geois German going home or to the post office: he sends off no special tele-

graphic sign; he constantly produces or reproduces finite segments, yet he

is already moving on a line no one even suspects.

In any case, the tele-

graphic line is not a symbol, and it is not simple. There are at least three of

them: a line of rigid and clear-cut segmentarity; a line of molecular

segmentarity; and an abstract line, a line of flight no less deadly and no less

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1874: THREE NOVELLAS, OR "WHAT HAPPENED?"

alive than the others. On the first line, there are many words and conversa-

tions, questions and answers, interminable explanations, precisions; the

second is made of silences, allusions, and hasty innuendos inviting

interpretation. But if the third line flashes, if the line of flight is like a train

in motion, it is because one jumps linearly on it, one can finally speak

"literally" of anything at all, a blade of grass, a catastrophe or sensation,

calmly accepting that which occurs when it is no longer possible for any-

thing to stand for anything else. The three lines, however, continually

intermingle.

Second Novella: "The

Crack-up," F. Scott Fitzgerald

What happened? This is the question Fitzgerald keeps coming back to

toward the end, having remarked that "of course all life is a process of

breaking down."

How should we understand this "of course"? We can say,

first of all, that life is always drawn into an increasingly rigid and desic-

cated segmentarity. For the writer Fitzgerald, voyages, with their clear-cut

segments, had lost their usefulness. There was also, from segment to seg-

ment, the depression, loss of wealth, fatigue and growing old, alcoholism,

the failure of conjugality, the rise of the cinema, the advent of fascism and

Stalinism, and the loss of success and talent—at the very moment

Fitzgerald would find his genius. " The big sudden blows that come, or seem
to come, from outside" (p. 69), and proceed by oversignificant breaks, mov-

ing us from one term to the other according to successive binary "choices":

rich/poor... Even when change runs in the other direction, there is nothing

to compensate for the rigidification, the aging that overcodes everything

that occurs. This is a line of rigid segmentarity bringing masses into play,

even if it was supple to begin with.

But Fitzgerald says that there is another type of cracking, with an en-

tirely different segmentarity. Instead of great breaks, these are

micro-cracks, as in a dish; they are much more subtle and supple, and occur
when things are going well on the other side. If there is aging on this line, it is

not of the same kind: when you age on this line you don't feel it on the

other line, you don't notice it on the other line until after "it" has already

happened on this line. At such a moment, which does not correspond to any

of the ages of the other line, you reach a degree, a quantum, an intensity

beyond which you cannot go. (It's a very delicate business, these

intensities: the finest intensity becomes harmful if it overtaxes your

strength at a given moment; you have to be able to take it, you have to be in

shape.) But what exactly happened? In truth, nothing assignable or

perceptible: molecular changes, redistributions of desire such that when

something occurs, the self that

1874:

THREE NOVELLAS, OR "WHAT HAPPENED?" □ 199

awaited it is already dead, or the one that would await it has not yet arrived.

This time, there are outbursts and crackings in the immanence of a rhi-

zome, rather than great movements and breaks determined by the tran-

scendence of a tree. The crack-up "happens almost without your knowing it

but is realized suddenly indeed" (p. 69). This molecular line, more supple

but no less disquieting, in fact, much more disquieting, is not simply inter-

nal or personal: it also brings everything into play, but on a different scale

and in different forms, with segmentations of a different nature,

rhizomatic instead of arborescent. A micropolitics.

There is, in addition, a third line, which is like a line of rupture or a

"clean break" and marks the exploding of the other two, their shake-up...

in favor of something else? "This led me to the idea that the ones who had

survived had made some sort of clean break. This is a big word and is no

parallel to a jailbreak when one is probably headed for a new jail or will be

forced back to the old one" (p. 81). Here, Fitzgerald contrasts rupture with

structural pseudobreaks in so-called signifying chains. But he also distin-

guishes it from more supple, more subterranean links or stems of the "voy-

age" type, or even from molecular conveyances. "The famous 'Escape' or

'run away from it all' is an excursion in a trap even if the trap includes the

South Seas, which are only for those who want to paint them or sail them. A

clean break is something you cannot come back from; that is irretrievable

because it makes the past cease to exist" (p. 81). Can it be that voyages are

always a return to rigid segmentarity? Is it always your daddy and mommy

that you meet when you travel, even as far away as the South Seas, like

Melville? Hardened muscles? Must we say that supple segmentarity itself

reconstructs the great figures it claimed to escape, but under the micro-

scope, in miniature? Beckett's unforgettable line is an indictment of all

voyages: " We don't travel for the fun of it, as far as I know; we're foolish, but
not that foolish."

In rupture, not only has the matter of the past volitized; the form of what

happened, of an imperceptible something that happened in a volatile mat-

ter, no longer even exists. One has become imperceptible and clandestine

in motionless voyage. Nothing can happen, or can have happened, any

longer. Nobody can do anything for or against me any longer. My territories

are out of grasp, not because they are imaginary, but the opposite: because I

am in the process of drawing them. Wars, big and little, are behind me. Voy-

ages, always in tow to something else, are behind me. I no longer have any

secrets, having lost my face, form, and matter. I am now no more than a

line. I have become capable of loving, not with an abstract, universal love,

but a love I shall choose, and that shall choose me, blindly, my double, just

as selfless as I. One has been saved by and for love, by abandoning love and

self. Now one is no more than an abstract line, like an arrow crossing the

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1874: THREE NOVELLAS, OR "WHAT HAPPENED?"

void. Absolute deterritorialization. One has become like everybody/the

whole world (tout le monde), but in a way that can become like everybody/

the whole world. One has painted the world on oneself, not oneself on the

world. It should not be said that the genius is an extraordinary person, nor

that everybody has genius. The genius is someone who knows how to make

everybody/the whole world a becoming (Ulysses, perhaps: Joyce's failed

ambition, Pound's near-success). One has entered becomings-animal,

becomings-molecular, and finally becomings-imperceptible. "I was off the

dispensing end of the relief roll forever. The heady villainous feeling con-

tinued. ... I will try to be a correct animal though, and if you throw me a

bone with enough meat on it I may even lick your hand."

Why such a

despairing tone? Does not the line of rupture or true flight have its own

danger, one worse than the others? Time to die. In any case, Fitzgerald pro-

poses a distinction between the three lines traversing us and composing "a

life" (after Maupassant). Break line, crack line, rupture line. The line of

rigid segmentarity with molar breaks; the line of supple segmentation with

molecular cracks; the line of flight or rupture, abstract, deadly and alive,

nonsegmentary.

Third Novella: "The Story of the

Abyss and the Spyglass," Pierrette Fleutiaux

Some segments are more or less near, and others more or less distant. The

segments seem to encircle an abyss, a kind of huge black hole. On each seg-

ment there are two kinds of lookouts, near-seers and far-seers. What they

watch for are the movements, outbursts, infractions, disturbances, and

rebellions occurring in the abyss. But there is a major difference between

the two types of lookouts. The near-seers have a simple spyglass. In the

abyss, they see the outline of gigantic cells, great binary divisions, dichoto-

mies, well-defined segments of the type "classroom, barracks, low-income

housing project, or even countryside seen from an airplane." They see

branches, chains, rows, columns, dominoes, striae. Once in a while along

the edges they discover a misshapen figure or a shaky contour. Then they

bring out the terrible Ray Telescope. It is used not to see with but to cut

with, to cut out shapes. This geometrical instrument, which emits a laser

beam, assures the dominion of the great signifying break everywhere and

restores the momentarily threatened molar order. The cutting telescope
overcodes everything; it acts on flesh and blood, but itself is nothing but

pure geometry, as a State affair, and the near-seers' physics in the service of

that machine. What is geometry, what is the State, and what are the

near-seers? These are meaningless questions ("I am speaking literally")

because it is not so much a question of defining something as effectively

drawing a

1874:

THREE NOVELLAS, OR "WHAT HAPPENED?" □ 201

line; not a line of writing but a line of rigid segmentarity along which every-

one will be judged and rectified according to his or her contours, individual

or collective.

Very different is the situation of those with long-distance vision, the

far-seers, with all their ambiguities. There are very few of them, at most one

per segment. Their telescopes are complex and refined. But they are in no

way leaders. And what they see is entirely different from what the others

see. They see a whole microsegmentarity, details of details, "a roller

coaster of possibilities," tiny movements that have not reached the edge,

lines or vibrations that start to form long before there are outlined shapes,

"segments that move by jerks." A whole rhizome, a molecular

segmentarity that does not permit itself to be overcoded by a signifier

like the cutting machine, or even to be attributed to a given figure, a given

aggregate or element. This second line is inseparable from the anonymous

segmentation that produces it and challenges everything all the time,

without goal or reason: "What happened?" The far-seers can divine the

future, but always in the form of a becoming of something that has already

happened in a molecular matter; unfindable particles. The situation is the

same in biology: the great cellular divisions and dichotomies, with their

contours, are accompanied by migrations, invaginations, displacements,

and morphogenetic impulses whose segments are marked not by

localizable points but by thresholds of intensity passing underneath,

mitoses that scramble everything, and molecular lines that intersect each

other within the large-scale cells and between their breaks. The situation is

the same in a society: rigid segments and overcutting segments are

crosscut underneath by segmentations of another nature. But this is

neither one nor the other, neither biology nor a society; nor is it a

resemblance between the two: "I am speaking literally," I am drawing

lines, lines of writing, and life passes between the lines. A line of supple

segmentarity formed and became entangled with the other, but it was a

very different kind of line, shakily drawn by the micro-politics of the

far-seers. It is a political affair, as worldwide in scope as the other, but on a

scale and in a form that is incommensurable, nonsuperpos-able. It is also a

perceptual affair, for perception always goes hand in hand with semiotics,

practice, politics, theory. One sees, speaks and thinks on a given scale,

and according to a given line that may or may not conjugate with the

other's line, even if the other is still oneself. If it does not, then you should

not insist, you should not argue; you should flee, flee, even saying as you go,

"Okay, okay, you win." It's no use talking; you first have to change

telescopes, mouths, and teeth, all of the segments. Not only does one speak

literally, one also lives literally, in other words, following lines, whether

connectable or not, even heterogeneous ones. Sometimes it doesn't work

when they are homogeneous."

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1874: THREE NOVELLAS, OR "WHAT HAPPENED?"

The ambiguity of the far-seers' situation is that they are able to detect the

slightest microinfraction in the abyss, things the others do not see; they also

observe, beneath its apparent geometrical justice, the dreadful damage

caused by the Cutting Telescope. They feel as though they foresee things

and are ahead of the others because they see the smallest thing as already

having happened; but they know that their warnings are to no avail because

the cutting telescope will set everything straight without being warned,

without the need for or possibility of prediction. At times they feel that

they do indeed see something the others do not, but at other times that

what they see differs only in degree and serves no purpose. Although they

are collaborators with the most rigid and cruelest project of control, how

could they not feel a vague sympathy for the subterranean activity revealed

to them? An ambiguity in the molecular line, as if it vacillated between two
sides. One day (what will have happened?), a far-seer will abandon his or

her segment and start walking across a narrow overpass above the dark

abyss, will break his or her telescope and depart on a line of flight to meet a

blind Double approaching from the other side.

Individual or group, we are traversed by lines, meridians, geodesies,

tropics, and zones marching to different beats and differing in nature. We

said that we are composed of lines, three kinds of lines. Or rather, of bun-

dles of lines, for each kind is multiple. We may be more interested in a cer-

tain line than in the others, and perhaps there is indeed one that is, not

determining, but of greater importance . . . if it is there. For some of these

lines are imposed on us from outside, at least in part. Others sprout up

somewhat by chance, from a trifle, why we will never know. Others can be

invented, drawn, without a model and without chance: we must invent our

lines of flight, if we are able, and the only way we can invent them is by

effectively drawing them, in our lives. Aren't lines of flight the most diffi-

cult of all? Certain groups or people have none and never will. Certain

groups or people lack a given kind of line, or have lost it. The painter Flor-

ence Julien has a special interest in lines of flight: she invented a procedure

by which she extracts from photographs lines that are nearly abstract and

formless. But once again, there is a bundle of very diverse lines: the line of

flight of children leaving school at a run is different from that of demon-

strators chased by the police, or of a prisoner breaking out. There are differ-

ent animal lines of flight: each species, each individual, has its own.

Fernand Deligny transcribes the lines and paths of autistic children by

means of maps: he carefully distinguishes "lines of drift" and "customary

lines." This does not only apply to walking; he also makes maps of percep-

tions and maps of gestures (cooking or collecting wood) showing custom-

ary gestures and gestures of drift. The same goes for language, if it is

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THREE NOVELLAS, OR "WHAT HAPPENED?" □ 203

present. Deligny opened his lines of writing to life lines. The lines are con-

stantly crossing, intersecting for a moment, following one another. A line of

drift intersects a customary line, and at that point the child does something

not quite belonging to either one: he or she finds something he or she lost—

what happened?—or jumps and claps his or her hands, a slight and rapid

movement—and that gesture in turn emits several lines.'

In short, there is

a line of flight, which is already complex since it has singularities; and there
a customary or molar line with segments; and between the two (?), there is a
molecular line with quanta that cause it to tip to one side or the other.

As Deligny says, it should be borne in mind that these lines mean noth-

ing. It is an affair of cartography. They compose us, as they compose our

map. They transform themselves and may even cross over into one

another. Rhizome. It is certain that they have nothing to do with language;

it is, on the contrary, language that must follow them, it is writing that must

take sustenance from them, between its own lines. It is certain that they

have nothing to do with a signifier, the determination of a subject by the

signifier; instead, the signifier arises at the most rigidified level of one of

the lines, and the subject is spawned at the lowest level. It is certain that

they have nothing to do with a structure, which is never occupied by any-

thing more than points and positions, by arborescences, and which always

forms a closed system, precisely in order to prevent escape. Deligny

invokes a common Body upon which these lines are inscribed as so many

segments, thresholds, or quanta, territorialities, deterritorializations, or

reterritorializations. The lines are inscribed on a Body without Organs,

upon which everything is drawn and flees, which is itself an abstract line

with neither imaginary figures nor symbolic functions: the real of the BwO.
This body is the only practical object of schizoanalysis: What is your body

without organs? What are your lines? What map are you in the process of

making or rearranging? What abstract line will you draw, and at what price,

for yourself and for others? What is your line of flight? What is your BwO,

merged with that line? Are you cracking up? Are you going to crack up? Are

you deterritorializing? Which lines are you severing, and which are you

extending or resuming? Schizoanalysis does not pertain to elements or

aggregates, nor to subjects, relations, or structures. It pertains only to linea-
ments running through groups as well as individuals. Schizoanalysis, as the

analysis of desire, is immediately practical and political, whether it is a

question of an individual, group, or society. For politics precedes being.

Practice does not come after the emplacement of the terms and their rela-

tions, but actively participates in the drawing of the lines; it confronts the

same dangers and the same variations as the emplacement does.

Schizoanalysis is like the art of the new. Or rather, there is no problem of

application: the lines it brings out could equally be the lines of a life, a work

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1874: THREE NOVELLAS, OR "WHAT HAPPENED?"

of literature or art, or a society, depending on which system of coordinates

is chosen.

Line of molar or rigid segmentarity, line of molecular or supple seg-

mentation, line of flight—many problems arise. The first concerns the
particular character of each line. It might be thought that rigid segments

are socially determined, predetermined, overcoded by the State; there

may be a tendency to construe supple segmentarity as an interior activity,

something imaginary or phantasmic. As for the line of flight, would it not

be entirely personal, the way in which an individual escapes on his or her

own account, escapes "responsibilities," escapes the world, takes refuge

in the desert, or else in art... ? False impression. Supple segmentarity has

nothing to do with the imaginary, and micropolitics is no less extensive

or real than macropolitics. Politics on the grand scale can never

administer its molar segments without also dealing with the micro-

injections or infiltrations that work in its favor or present an obstacle to it;

indeed, the larger the molar aggregates, the greater the molecularization

of the agencies they put into play. Lines of flight, for their part, never con-

sist in running away from the world but rather in causing runoffs, as when

you drill a hole in a pipe; there is no social system that does not leak from

all directions, even if it makes its segments increasingly rigid in order to

seal the lines of flight. There is nothing imaginary, nothing symbolic,

about a line of flight. There is nothing more active than a line of flight,

among animals or humans.

Even History is forced to take that route

rather than proceeding by "signifying breaks." What is escaping in a soci-

ety at a given moment? It is on lines of flight that new weapons are

invented, to be turned against the heavy arms of the State. "I may be run-

ning, but I'm looking for a gun as I go" (George Jackson). It was along lines

of flight that the nomads swept away everything in their path and found

new weapons, leaving the Pharaoh thunderstruck. It is possible for a sin-

gle group, or a single individual even, to exhibit all the lines we have been

discussing simultaneously. But it is most frequently the case that a single

group or individual functions as a line of flight; that group or individual

creates the line rather than following it, is itself the living weapon it forges

rather than stealing one. Lines of flight are realities; they are very danger-

ous for societies, although they can get by without them, and sometimes

manage to keep them to a minimum.

The second problem concerns the respective importance of the lines.

You can begin with the rigid segmentarity, it's the easiest, it's pregiven;

and then you can look at how and to what extent it is crosscut by a supple

segmentarity, a kind of rhizome surrounding its roots. Then you can look

at how the line of flight enters in. And alliances and battles. But it is also

possible to begin with the line of flight: perhaps this is the primary line,

1874: THREE NOVELLAS, OR "WHAT HAPPENED?" □ 205

with its absolute deterritorialization. It is clear that the line of flight does
not come afterward; it is there from the beginning, even if it awaits its

hour, and waits for the others to explode. Supple segmentarity, then, is

only a kind of compromise operating by relative deterritorializations and

permitting reterritorializations that cause blockages and reversions to the

rigid line. It is odd how supple segmentarity is caught between the two

other lines, ready to tip to one side or the other; such is its ambiguity. It is

also necessary to look at the various combinations: it is quite possible that

one group or individual's line of flight may not work to benefit that of

another group or individual; it may on the contrary block it, plug it, throw

it even deeper into rigid segmentarity. It can happen in love that one per-

son's creative line is the other's imprisonment. The composition of the

lines, of one line with another, is a problem, even of two lines of the same

type. There is no assurance that two lines of flight will prove compatible,

compossible. There is no assurance that the body without organs will be

easy to compose. There is no assurance that a love, or a political ap-

proach, will withstand it.

Third problem: there is a mutual immanence of the lines. And it is not

easy to sort them out. No one of them is transcendent, each is at work

within the others. Immanence everywhere. Lines of flight are immanent to

the social field. Supple segmentarity continually dismantles the concre-

tions of rigid segmentarity, but everything that it dismantles it reassembles

on its own level: micro-Oedipuses, microformations of power,

microfascisms. The line of flight blasts the two segmentary series apart; but

it is capable of the worst, of bouncing off the wall, falling into a black hole,

taking the path of greatest regression, and in its vagaries reconstructing the

most rigid of segments. Have you sown your wild oats? That is worse than

not escaping at all: See Lawrence's reproach to Melville.

Between the

matter of a dirty little secret in rigid segmentarity, the empty form of

"What happened?" in supple segmentarity, and clandestinity of what can

no longer happen on the line of flight, how can we fail to see the upheavals

caused by a monster force, the Secret, threatening to bring everything tum-

bling down? Between the Couple of the first kind of segmentarity, the Dou-

ble of the second, and the Clandestine of the line of flight, there are so many

possible mixtures and passages.

There is one last problem, the most anguishing one, concerning the dan-

gers specific to each line. There is not much to say about the danger con-

fronting the first, for the chances are slim that its rigidification will fail.

There is not much to say about the ambiguity of the second. But why is the

line of flight, even aside from the danger it runs of reverting to one of the

other two lines, imbued with such singular despair in spite of its message of

joy, as if at the very moment things are coming to a resolution its undertak-

206 □

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ing were threatened by something reaching down to its core, by a death, a

demolition? Shestov said of Chekhov, a great creator of novellas: "There

can be practically no doubt that Chekhov exerted himself, and something

broke inside him. And the overstrain came not from hard and heavy labor;

no mighty overpowering exploit broke him: he stumbled and fell, he

slipped. . . . The old Chekhov of gaiety and mirth is no more. . . . Instead, a

morose and overshadowed man, a 'criminal.' "

What happened? Once

again, this is the question facing all of Chekhov's characters. Is it not possi-

ble to exert oneself, and even break something, without falling into a black

hole of bitterness and sand? But did Chekhov really fall? Is that not to

judge him entirely from the outside? Was Chekhov not correct in saying

that however grim his characters are, he still carries "a hundred pounds of

love"? Of course, nothing is easy on the lines that compose us, and that con-

stitute the essence of the Novella (la Nouvelle), and sometimes of Good

News (la Bonne Nouvelle).

What are your couples, your doubles, your clandestines, and what are

their mixes? When one person says to another, love the taste of whiskey on

my lips like I love the gleam of madness in your eyes, what lines are they in

the process of composing, or, on the contrary, making incompossible?

Fitzgerald: "Perhaps fifty percent of our friends and relations will tell you

in good faith that it was my drinking that drove Zelda mad, and the other

half would assure you that it was her madness that drove me to drink. Nei-

ther of these judgments means much of anything. These two groups of

friends and relations would be unanimous in saying that each of us would

have been much better off without the other. The irony is that we have

never been more in love with each other in all of our lives. She loves the

alcohol on my lips. I cherish her most extravagant hallucinations." "In the

end, nothing really had much importance. We destroyed ourselves. But in

all honesty, I never thought we destroyed each other." Beautiful texts. All

of the lines are there: the lines of family and friends, of all those who

speak, explain, and psychoanalyze, assigning rights and wrongs, of the

whole binary machine of the Couple, united or divided, in rigid

seg-mentarity (50 percent). Then there is the line of supple segmentation,

from which the alcoholic and the madwoman extract, as from a kiss on the

lips and eyes, the multiplication of a double at the limit of what they can

endure in their state and with the tacit understandings serving them as

internal messages. Finally, there is a line of flight, all the more shared now

that they are separated, or vice versa, each of them the clandestine of the

other, a double all the more successful now that nothing has importance

any longer, now that everything can begin anew, since they have been

destroyed but not by each other. Nothing will enter memory, everything

was on the lines, between the lines, in the AND that made one and the

1933:

MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY □ 209

cular fashion, in ever larger circles, ever wider disks or coronas, like Joyce's

"letter": my affairs, my neighborhood's affairs, my city's, my country's, the

world's .. . We are segmented in a linear fashion, along a straight line or a

number of straight lines, of which each segment represents an episode or

"proceeding": as soon as we finish one proceeding we begin another, forever

proceduring or procedured, in the family, in school, in the army, on the job.

School tells us, "You're not at home anymore"; the army tells us, "You're not

in school anymore" . .. Sometimes the various segments belong to different

individuals or groups, and sometimes the same individual or group passes

from one segment to another. But these figures of segmentarity, the binary,

circular, and linear, are bound up with one another, even cross over into each

other, changing according to the point of view. This is already evident among

"savage" peoples: Lizot shows how the communal House is organized in cir-

cular fashion, going from interior to exterior in a series of coronas within

which certain types of localizable activities take place (worship and ceremo-

nies, followed by exchange of goods, followed by family life, followed by

trash and excrement); at the same time "each of these coronas is itself

trans-versally divided, each segment devolves upon a particular lineage and is

subdivided among different kinship groups."

In a more general context,

Levi-Strauss shows that the dualist organization of primitive peoples has a

circular form, and also takes a linear form encompassing "any number of

groups" (at least three).

Why return to the primitives, when it is a question of our own life? The

fact is that the notion of segmentarity was constructed by ethnologists to

account for so-called primitive societies, which have no fixed, central State

apparatus and no global power mechanisms or specialized political institu-

tions. In these societies, the social segments have a certain leeway, between

the two extreme poles of fusion and scission, depending on the task and the

situation; there is also considerable communicability between heterogene-

ous elements, so that one segment can fit with another in a number of

different ways; and they have a local construction excluding the prior

determination of a base domain (economic, political, juridical, artistic);

they have extrinsic and situational properties, or relations irreducible to

the intrinsic properties of a structure; activity is continuous, so segmen-

tarity is not grasped as something separate from a

segmentation-in-progress operating by outgrowths, detachments, and

mergings. Primitive segmentarity is characterized by a polyvocal code

based on lineages and their varying situations and relations, and an

itinerant territoriality based on local, overlapping divisions. Codes and

territories, clan lineages and tribal territorialities, form a fabric of

relatively supple segmentarity.

However, it seems to us difficult to maintain that State societies, even

our modern States, are any less segmentary. The classical opposition

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between segmentarity and centralization hardly seems relevant.

Not only

does the State exercise power over the segments it sustains or permits to

survive, but it possesses, and imposes, its own segmentarity. Perhaps the

opposition sociologists establish between the segmentary and the central is

biological deep down: the ringed worm, and the central nervous system.

But the central brain itself is a worm, even more segmented than the others,

in spite of and including all of its vicarious actions. There is no opposition

between the central and the segmentary. The modern political system is a

global whole, unified and unifying, but is so because it implies a constella-

tion of juxtaposed, imbricated, ordered subsystems; the analysis of deci-

sion making brings to light all kinds of compartmentalizations and partial

processes that interconnect, but not without gaps and displacements.

Technocracy operates by the segmentary division of labor (this applies to

the international division of labor as well). Bureaucracy exists only in com-

partmentalized offices and functions only by "goal displacements" and the

corresponding "dysfunctions." Hierarchy is not simply pyramidal; the

boss's office is as much at the end of the hall as on top of the tower. In short,

we would say that modern life has not done away with segmentarity but has

on the contrary made it exceptionally rigid.

Instead of setting up an opposition between the segmentary and the cen-

tralized, we should make a distinction between two types of segmentarity,

one "primitive" and supple, the other "modern" and rigid. This distinction

reframes each of the figures previously discussed.

1. Binary oppositions (men/women, those on top/those on the bottom,

etc.) are very strong in primitive societies, but seem to be the result of

machines and assemblages that are not in themselves binary. The social

binarity between men and women in a group applies rules according to

which both sexes must take their respective spouses from different groups

(which is why there are at least three groups). Thus Levi-Strauss can dem-

onstrate that dualist organization never stands on its own in this kind of

society. On the contrary, it is a particularity of modern societies, or rather

State societies, to bring into their own duality machines that function as

such, and proceed simultaneously by biunivocal relationships and succes-

sively by binarized choices. Classes and sexes come in twos, and phenom-

ena of tripartition result from a transposition of the dual, not the reverse.

We have already encountered this, notably in the case of the Face machine,

which differs in this respect from primitive head machines. It seems that

modern societies elevated dual segmentarity to the level of a self-sufficient

organization. The question, therefore, is not whether the status of women,

or those on the bottom, is better or worse, but the type of organization from

which that status results.

2. Similarly, we may note that in primitive societies circular segmen-

1933:

MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY D 211

tarity does not necessarily imply that the circles are concentric, or have the

same center. In a supple regime, centers already act as so many knots, eyes,

or black holes; but they do not all resonate together, they do not fall on the

same point, they do not converge in the same black hole. There is a multi-

plicity of animist eyes, each of which is assigned, for example, a particular

animal spirit (snake-spirit, woodpecker-spirit, cayman-spirit ...). Each

black hole is occupied by a different animal eye. Doubtless, we see opera-

tions of rigidification and centralization take shape here and there: all of

the centers must collect on a single circle, which itself has a single center.

The shaman draws lines between all the points or spirits, outlines a constel-

lation, a radiating set of roots tied to a central tree. This is the birth of a cen-

tralized power with an arborescent system to discipline the outgrowths of

the primitive rhizome.

Here, the tree simultaneously plays the role of a

principle of dichotomy or binarity, and an axis of rotation. But the power of

the shaman is still entirely localized, strictly dependent upon a particular

segment, contingent upon drugs, and each point continues to emit inde-

pendent sequences. The same cannot be said of modern societies, or even

of States. Of course, the centralized is not opposed to the segmentary, and

the circles remain distinct. But they become concentric, definitively

arborified. The segmentarity becomes rigid, to the extent that all centers

resonate in, and all black holes fall on, a single point of accumulation that is

like a point of intersection somewhere behind the eyes. The face of the

father, teacher, colonel, boss, enter into redundancy, refer back to a center

of signifiance that moves across the various circles and passes back over all

of the segments. The supple microheads with animal facializations are

replaced by a macroface whose center is everywhere and circumference

nowhere. There are no longer n eyes in the sky, or in becomings-animal and

-vegetable, but a central computing eye scanning all of the radii. The cen-

tral State is constituted not by the abolition of circular segmentarity but by

a concentricity of distinct circles, or the organization of a resonance among

centers. There are already just as many power centers in primitive societies;
or, if one prefers, there are still just as many in State societies. The latter,

however, behave as apparatuses of resonance; they organize resonance,

whereas the former inhibit it.

3. Finally, in the case of linear segmentarity, we would say that each seg-

ment is underscored, rectified, and homogenized in its own right, but also

in relation to the others. Not only does each have its own unit of measure,

but there is an equivalence and translatability between units. The central

eye has as its correlate a space through which it moves, but it itself remains

invariant in relation to its movements. With the Greek city-state and

Cleisthenes' reform, a homogeneous and isotopic space appears that

overcodes the lineal segments, at the same time as distinct focal points

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begin to resonate in a center acting as their common denominator.

Paul

Virilio shows that after the Greek city-state, the Roman Empire imposes a

geometrical or linear reason of State including a general outline of camps

and fortifications, a universal art of "marking boundaries by lines," a

laying-out of territories, a substitution of space for places and territoriali-

ties, and a transformation of the world into the city; in short, an increas-

ingly rigid segmentarity.

The segments, once underscored or overcoded,

seem to lose their ability to bud, they seem to lose their dynamic relation to

segmentations-in-progress, or in the act of coming together or coming

apart. If there exists a primitive "geometry" (a protogeometry), it is an

operative geometry in which figures are never separable from the affecta-

tions befalling them, the lines of their becoming, the segments of their seg-

mentation: there is "roundness," but no circle, "alignments," but no

straight line, etc. On the contrary, State geometry, or rather the bond

between the State and geometry, manifests itself in the primacy of the

theorem-element, which substitutes fixed or ideal essences for supple mor-

phological formations, properties for affects, predetermined segments for

segmentations-in-progress. Geometry and arithmetic take on the power of

the scalpel. Private property implies a space that has been overcoded and

gridded by surveying. Not only does each line have its segments, but the

segments of one line correspond to those of another; for example, the wage

regime establishes a correspondence between monetary segments, produc-

tion segments, and consumable-goods segments.

We may summarize the principal differences between rigid segmentarity

and supple segmentarity. In the rigid mode, binary segmentarity stands on

its own and is governed by great machines of direct binarization, whereas in

the other mode, binarities result from "multiplicities of n dimensions." Sec-

ond, circular segmentarity tends to become concentric, in other words,

causes all of its focal points to coincide in a single center that is in constant

movement but remains invariant through its movements, and is part of a

machine of resonance. Finally, linear segmentarity feeds into a machine of

overcoding that constitutes more geometrico homogeneous space and

extracts segments that are determinate as to their substance, form, and rela-

tions. It will be noted that this rigid segmentarity is always expressed by the

Tree. The Tree is the knot of arborescence or principle of dichotomy; it is the

axis of'rotation guaranteeing concentricity; it is the structure or network

gridding the possible. This opposition between arborified and rhizomatic

segmentarity is not just meant to indicate two states of a single process, but

also to isolate two different processes. For primitive societies operate essen-

tially by codes and territorialities. It is in fact the distinction between these

two elements, the tribal system of territories and the clan system of lineages,

that prevents resonance.

Modern, or State, societies, on the other hand,

1933:

MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY □ 213

have replaced the declining codes with a univocal overcoding, and the lost

territories with a specific reterritorialization (which takes place in an

overcoded geometrical space). Segmentarity is always the result of an

abstract machine, but different abstract machines operate in the rigid and

the supple.

It is not enough, therefore, to oppose the centralized to the segmentary.

Nor is it enough to oppose two kinds of segmentarity, one supple and prim-

itive, the other modern and rigidified. There is indeed a distinction

between the two, but they are inseparable, they overlap, they are entangled.

Primitive societies have nuclei of rigidity or arborification that as much

anticipate the State as ward it off. Conversely, our societies are still suf-

fused by a supple fabric without which their rigid segments would not hold.

Supple segmentarity cannot be restricted to primitive peoples. It is not the

vestige of the savage within us but a perfectly contemporary function,

inseparable from the other. Every society, and every individual, are thus

plied by both segmentarities simultaneously: one molar, the other molecu-
lar. If they are distinct, it is because they do not have the same terms or the

same relations or the same nature or even the same type of multiplicity. If

they are inseparable, it is because they coexist and cross over into each

other. The configurations differ, for example, between the primitives and

us, but the two segmentarities are always in presupposition. In short, every-

thing is political, but every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a
micropolitics. Take aggregates of the perception or feeling type: their molar

organization, their rigid segmentarity, does not preclude the existence of

an entire world of unconscious micropercepts, unconscious affects, fine

segmentations that grasp or experience different things, are distributed

and operate differently. There is a micropolitics of perception, affection,

conversation, and so forth. If we consider the great binary aggregates, such

as the sexes or classes, it is evident that they also cross over into molecular

assemblages of a different nature, and that there is a double reciprocal

dependency between them. For the two sexes imply a multiplicity of molec-

ular combinations bringing into play not only the man in the woman and

the woman in the man, but the relation of each to the animal, the plant, etc.:

a thousand tiny sexes. And social classes themselves imply "masses" that

do not have the same kind of movement, distribution, or objectives and do

not wage the same kind of struggle. Attempts to distinguish mass from class

effectively tend toward this limit: the notion of mass is a molecular notion

operating according to a type of segmentation irreducible to the molar

segmentarity of class. Yet classes are indeed fashioned from masses; they

crystallize them. And masses are constantly flowing or leaking from

classes. Their reciprocal presupposition, however, does not preclude a dif-

214 □ 1933: MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY

ference in viewpoint, nature, scale, and function (understood in this way,

the notion of mass has entirely different connotations than Canetti's

"crowd").

It is not sufficient to define bureaucracy by a rigid segmentarity with

compartmentalization of contiguous offices, an office manager in each

segment, and the corresponding centralization at the end of the hall or on

top of the tower. For at the same time there is a whole bureaucratic segmen-

tation, a suppleness of and communication between offices, a bureaucratic

perversion, a permanent inventiveness or creativity practiced even against

administrative regulations. If Kafka is the greatest theorist of bureaucracy,

it is because he shows how, at a certain level (but which one? it is not

localizable), the barriers between offices cease to be "a definite dividing

line" and are immersed in a molecular medium (milieu) that dissolves

them and simultaneously makes the office manager proliferate into

microfigures impossible to recognize or identify, discernible only when

they are centralizable: another regime, coexistent with the separation and

totalization of the rigid segments.

We would even say that fascism implies

a molecular regime that is distinct both from molar segments and their cen-

tralization. Doubtless, fascism invented the concept of the totalitarian

State, but there is no reason to define fascism by a concept of its own devis-

ing: there are totalitarian States, of the Stalinist or military dictatorship

type, that are not fascist. The concept of the totalitarian State applies only

at the macropohtical level, to a rigid segmentarity and a particular mode of

totalization and centralization. But fascism is inseparable from a prolifera-

tion of molecular focuses in interaction, which skip from point to point,
before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State. Rural

fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, youth fascism and war veteran's

fascism, fascism of the Left and fascism of the Right, fascism of the couple,

family, school, and office: every fascism is defined by a micro-black hole

that stands on its own and communicates with the others, before resonat-

ing in a great, generalized central black hole.

' There is fascism when a war

machine is installed in each hole, in every niche. Even after the National

Socialist State had been established, microfascisms persisted that gave it

unequaled ability to act upon the "masses." Daniel Guerin is correct to say

that if Hitler took power, rather then taking over the German State admin-

istration, it was because from the beginning he had at his disposal

microorganizations giving him "an unequaled, irreplaceable ability to

penetrate every cell of society," in other words, a molecular and supple

segmentarity, flows capable of suffusing every kind of cell. Conversely, if

capitalism came to consider the fascist experience as catastrophic, if it pre-

ferred to ally itself with Stalinist totalitarianism, which from its point of

view was much more sensible and manageable, it was because the

1933:

MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY □ 215

segmentarity and centralization of the latter was more classical and less

fluid. What makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or micropolitical

power, for it is a mass movement: a cancerous body rather than a totalitar-

ian organism. American film has often depicted these molecular focal

points; band, gang, sect, family, town, neighborhood, vehicle fascisms

spare no one. Only microfascism provides an answer to the global ques-

tion: Why does desire desire its own repression, how can it desire its own

repression? The masses certainly do not passively submit to power; nor do

they "want" to be repressed, in a kind of masochistic hysteria; nor are they

tricked by an ideological lure. Desire is never separable from complex

assemblages that necessarily tie into molecular levels, from

microforma-tions already shaping postures, attitudes, perceptions,

expectations, semiotic systems, etc. Desire is never an undifferentiated

instinctual energy, but itself results from a highly developed, engineered

setup rich in interactions: a whole supple segmentarity that processes

molecular energies and potentially gives desire a fascist determination.

Leftist organizations will not be the last to secrete microfascisms. It's too

easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist

inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with

molecules both personal and collective.

Four errors concerning this molecular and supple segmentarity are to be

avoided. The first is axiological and consists in believing that a little sup-

pleness is enough to make things "better." But microfascisms are what

make fascism so dangerous, and fine segmentations are as harmful as the

most rigid of segments. The second is psychological, as if the molecular

were in the realm of the imagination and applied only to the individual and

interindividual. But there is just as much social-Real on one line as on the

other. Third, the two forms are not simply distinguished by size, as a small

form and a large form; although it is true that the molecular works in detail

and operates in small groups, this does not mean that it is any less coexten-

sive with the entire social field than molar organization. Finally, the quali-

tative difference between the two lines does not preclude their boosting or

cutting into each other; there is always a proportional relation between the

two, directly or inversely proportional.

In the first case, the stronger the molar organization is, the more it

induces a molecularization of its own elements, relations, and elementary

apparatuses. When the machine becomes planetary or cosmic, there is an

increasing tendency for assemblages to miniaturize, to become

micro-assemblages. Following Andre Gorz's formula, the only remaining

element of work left under world capitalism is the molecular, or

molecularized, individual, in other words, the "mass" individual. The

administration of a great organized molar security has as its correlate a

whole micro-

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1933: MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY

management of petty fears, a permanent molecular insecurity, to the point

that the motto of domestic policymakers might be: a macropolitics of soci-

ety by and for a micropolitics of insecurity.

However, the second case is

even more important: molecular movements do not complement but

rather thwart and break through the great worldwide organization. That is

what French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing was saying in his military

and political geography lesson: the more balanced things are between East

and West, in an overcoding and overarmed dualist machine, the more

"destabilized" they become along the other, North-South, line. There is

always a Palestinian or Basque or Corsican to bring about a "regional

destabilization of security."

The two great molar aggregates of the East

and West are perpetually being undermined by a molecular segmentation

causing a zigzag crack, making it difficult for them to keep their own seg-

ments in line. It is as if a line of flight, perhaps only a tiny trickle to begin

with, leaked between the segments, escaping their centralization, eluding

their totalization. The profound movements stirring in a society present

themselves in this fashion, even if they are necessarily "represented" as a

confrontation between molar segments. It is wrongly said (in Marxism in

particular) that a society is defined by its contradictions. That is true only

on the larger scale of things. From the viewpoint of micropolitics, a society

is defined by its lines of flight, which are molecular. There is always some-

thing that flows or flees, that escapes the binary organizations, the reso-

nance apparatus, and the overcoding machine: things that are attributed to

a "change in values," the youth, women, the mad, etc. May 1968 in France

was molecular, making what led up to it all the more imperceptible from

the viewpoint of macropolitics. It happens that people who are very lim-

ited in outlook or are very old grasp the event better than the most

advanced politicians, or politicians who consider themselves advanced

from the viewpoint of organization. As Gabriel Tarde said, what one needs

to know is which peasants, in which areas of the south of France, stopped

greeting the local landowners. A very old, outdated landowner can in this

case judge things better than a modernist. It was the same with May '68:

those who evaluated things in macropohtical terms understood nothing of

the event because something unaccountable was escaping. The politicians,

the parties, the unions, many leftists, were utterly vexed; they kept repeat-

ing over and over again that "conditions" were not ripe. It was as though

they had been temporarily deprived of the entire dualism machine that

made them valid spokespeople. Bizarrely, de Gaulle, and even Pompidou,

understood much more than the others. A molecular flow was escaping,

minuscule at first, then swelling, without, however, ceasing to be

unassignable. The reverse, however, is also true: molecular escapes and

movements would be nothing if they did not return to the molar orga-

1933:

MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY □ 217

nizations to reshuffle their segments, their binary distributions of sexes,

classes, and parties.

The issue is that the molar and the molecular are distinguished not by

size, scale, or dimension but by the nature of the system of reference envi-

sioned. Perhaps, then, the words "line" and "segment" should be reserved

for molar organization, and other, more suitable, words should be sought

for molecular composition. And in fact, whenever we can identify a

well-defined segmented line, we notice that it continues in another form,

as a quantum flow. And in every instance, we can locate a "power center" at

the border between the two, defined not by an absolute exercise of power

within its domain but by the relative adaptations and conversions it effects

between the line and the flow. Take a monetary flow with segments. These

segments can be defined from several points of view, for example, from the

viewpoint of a corporate budget (real wages, net profit, management sala-

ries, interest on assets, reserves, investments, etc.). Now this line of

payment-money is linked to another aspect, namely, the flow of

financing-money, which has, not segments, but rather poles, singularities,

and quanta (the poles of the flow are the creation of money and its

destruction; the singularities are nominal liquid assets; the quanta are

inflation, deflation, stagflation, etc.). This has led some to speak of a

"mutant, convulsive, creative and circulatory flow" tied to desire and

always subjacent to the solid line and its segments determining interest

rates and supply and demand.

In a balance of payment, we again

encounter a binary segmentarity that distinguishes, for example,

so-called autonomous operations from so-called compensatory operations.

But movements of capital do not allow themselves to be segmented in this

way; because they are "the most thoroughly broken down, according to

their nature, duration, and the personality of the creditor or debtor," one "no

longer has any idea where to draw the line when dealing with these

flows."

Yet there is always a correlation between the two aspects since

linearization and segmentation are where flows run dry, but are also their

point of departure for a new creation. When we talk about banking power,

concentrated most notably in the central banks, it is indeed a question of

the relative power to regulate "as much as" possible the communication,

conversion, and coadaptation of the two parts of the circuit. That is why

power centers are defined much more by what escapes them or by their

impotence than by their zone of power. In short, the molecular, or

microeconomics, micropolitics, is defined not by the smallness of its

elements but by the nature of its "mass"—the quantum flow as opposed to

the molar segmented line.

The task of making the segments correspond to

the quanta, of adjusting the segments to the quanta, implies hit-and-miss

changes in rhythm and mode rather than any omnipotence; and something

always escapes.

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1933: MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY

We could take other examples, such as the power of the Church. Church

power has always been associated with a certain administration of sin

possessing a strong segmentarity (the seven deadly sins), units of measure

(how many times?), and rules of equivalence and atonement (confession,

penance . . .). But there is also what might be called the molecular flow of

sinfulness, something quite different yet complementary: it hugs close to

the linear zone, as though negotiated through it, but itself has only poles

(original sin-redemption or grace) and quanta ("that sin which is the

default of consciousness of sin"; the sin of having a consciousness of sin;

the sin of the consequence of having a consciousness of sin).

The same

could be said of a flow of criminality, in contrast to the molar line of a legal

code and its divisions. Or to take another example, discussions of military

power, or the power of the army, consider a segmentable line broken down

into types of war corresponding exactly to the States waging war and the

political goals those States assign themselves (from "limited" war to "total"

war). But following Clausewitz's intuition, the war machine is very differ-

ent; it is a flow of absolute war stretching between an offensive and a defen-

sive pole, and is marked only by quanta (psychic and material forces that

are like the nominal liquid assets of war). We may say of the pure flow that it

is abstract yet real; ideal yet effective; absolute yet "differentiated." It is

true that the flow and its quanta can be grasped only by virtue of indexes on

the segmented line, but conversely, that line and those indexes exist only by

virtue of the flow suffusing them. In every case, it is evident that the seg-

mented line (macropolitics) is immersed in and prolonged by quantum

flows (micropolitics) that continually reshuffle and stir up its segments.

A: flow and poles

s***/

a: quanta

b: line and segments

B: power center

(all of which constitutes a

cycle or period)

A V

s^^

Bb i

In homage to Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904): his long-forgotton work has

assumed new relevance with the influence of American sociology, in par-

ticular microsociology. It had been quashed by Durkheim and his school

(in polemics similar to and as harsh as Cuvier's against Geoffroy

Saint-Hilaire). Durkheim's preferred objects of study were the great

collective representations, which are generally binary, resonant, and

overcoded. Tarde countered that collective representations presuppose

exactly what needs explaining, namely, "the similarity of millions of

people." That is why Tarde was interested instead in the world of detail,

or of the infini-

1933:

MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY D 219

tesimal: the little imitations, oppositions, and inventions constituting an

entire realm of subrepresentative matter. Tarde's best work was his analy-

ses of a minuscule bureaucratic innovation, or a linguistic innovation, etc.

The Durkheimians answered that what Tarde did was psychology or

inter-psychology, not sociology. But that is true only in appearance, as a

first approximation: a microimitation does seem to occur between two

individuals. But at the same time, and at a deeper level, it has to do not

with an individual but with a flow or a wave. Imitation is the propagation of
a flow; opposition is binarization, the making binary of flows; invention is a
conjugation or connection of different flows. What, according to Tarde, is a

flow? It is belief or desire (the two aspects of every assemblage); a flow is

always of belief and of desire. Beliefs and desires are the basis of every

society, because they are flows and as such are "quantifiable"; they are

veritable social Quantities, whereas sensations are qualitative and

representations are simple resultants.

Infinitesimal imitation, opposition,

and invention are therefore like flow quanta marking a propagation,

binarization, or conjugation of beliefs and desires. Hence the importance

of statistics, providing it concerns itself with the cutting edges and not

only with the "stationary" zone of representations. For in the end, the

difference is not at all between the social and the individual (or

interindividual), but between the molar realm of representations, individual

or collective, and the molecular realm of beliefs and desires in which the

distinction between the social and the individual loses all meaning since

flows are neither attributable to individuals nor overcodable by collective

signifiers. Representations already define large-scale aggregates, or

determine segments on a line; beliefs and desires, on the other hand, are

flows marked by quanta, flows that are created, exhausted, or

transformed, added to one another, subtracted or combined. Tarde

invented microsociology and took it to its full breadth and scope,

denouncing in advance the misinterpretations to which it would later fall

victim.

This is how you tell the difference between the segmented line and the

quantum flow. A mutant flow always implies something tending to elude or

escape the codes; quanta are precisely signs or degrees of

deterrito-rialization in the decoded flow. The rigid line, on the other

hand, implies an overcoding that substitutes itself for the faltering codes; its

segments are like reterritorializations on the overcoding or overcoded line.

Let us return to the case of original sin: it is the very act of a flow marking

a decoding in relation to creation (with just one last island preserved for

the Virgin), and a deterritorialization in relation to the land of Adam; but it

simultaneously performs an overcoding by binary organizations and

resonance (Powers, Church, empires, rich-poor, men-women, etc.) and

complementary reterritorializations (on the land of Cain, on work, on

reproduction, on

220 □

1933: MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY

money.. .)• Now the two systems of reference are in inverse relation to

each other, in the sense that the first eludes the second, or the second arrests

the first, prevents it from flowing further; but at the same time, they are

strictly complementary and coexistent, because one exists only as a func-

tion of the other; yet they are different and in direct relation to each

other, although corresponding term by term, because the second only

effectively arrests the first on a "plane" that is not the plane specific to the

first, while the momentum of the first continues on its own plane.

A social field is always animated by all kinds of movements of decoding

and deterritorialization affecting "masses" and operating at different

speeds and paces. These are not contradictions but escapes. At this level,

everything is a question of mass. For example, from the tenth to the four-

teenth centuries we see an acceleration of factors of decoding and deterri-

torialization: the masses of the last invaders swooping down from north,

east, and south; military masses turned into pillaging bands; ecclesiastical

masses confronted with infidels and heretics, and adopting increasingly

deterritorialized objectives; peasant masses leaving the seigneurial do-

mains; seigneurial masses forced to find means of exploitation less terri-

torial than serfdom; urban masses breaking away from the backcountry

and finding increasingly less territorialized social arrangements in the cit-

ies; women's masses detaching themselves from the old passional and con-

jugal code; monetary masses that cease to be a hoard object and inject

themselves into great commercial circuits.

We may cite the Crusades as

effecting a connection of flows, each boosting and accelerating the others

(even the flow of femininity in the "faraway Princess," even the flow of chil-

dren in the Crusades of the thirteenth century). But at the same time, and

inseparably, there occur overcodings and reterritorializations. The Cru-

sades were overcoded by the pope and assigned territorial objectives. The

Holy Land, the Peace of God, a new type of abbey, new figures of money,

new modes of exploitation of the peasant through leasehold and the wage

system (or revivals of slavery), urban reterritorializations, etc., form a

complex system. At this point, we must introduce a distinction between the

two notions of connection and conjugation of flows. "Connection" indi-

cates the way in which decoded and deterritorialized flows boost one

another, accelerate their shared escape, and augment or stoke their quanta;

the "conjugation" of these same flows, on the other hand, indicates their

relative stoppage, like a point of accumulation that plugs or seals the lines

of flight, performs a general reterritorialization, and brings the flows under

the dominance of a single flow capable of overcoding them. But it is pre-

cisely the most deterritorialized flow, under the first aspect, that always

brings about the accumulation or conjunction of the processes, determines

the overcoding, and serves as the basis for reterritorialization under the

1933:

MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY D 221

second aspect (we have already encountered a theorem according to which

it is always on the most deterritorialized element that reterritorialization

takes place). For example, the merchant bourgeoisie of the cities conju-

gated or capitalized a domain of knowledge, a technology, assemblages and

circuits into whose dependency the nobility, Church, artisans, and even

peasants would enter. It is precisely because the bourgeoisie was a cutting

edge of deterritorialization, a veritable particle accelerator, that it also per-

formed an overall reterritorialization.

The task of the historian is to designate the "period" of coexistence or

simultaneity of these two movements (decoding-deterritorialization and

overcoding-reterritorialization). For the duration of this period, one distin-

guishes between the molecular aspect and the molar aspect: on the one hand,
masses or flows, with their mutations, quanta of deterritorialization, con-

nections, and accelerations; on the other hand, classes or segments, with

their binary organization, resonance, conjunction or accumulation, and line

of overcoding favoring one line over the others.

The difference between

macrohistory and microhistory has nothing to do with the length of the

durations envisioned, long or short, but rather concerns distinct systems of

reference, depending on whether it is an overcoded segmented line that is

under consideration or the mutant quantum flow. The rigid system does not

bring the other system to a halt: the flow continues beneath the line, forever

mutant, while the line totalizes. Mass and class do not have the same con-

tours or the same dynamic, even though the same group can be assigned both

signs. The bourgeoisie considered as a mass and as a class... The relations

of a mass to other masses are not the same as the relations of the "corre-

sponding" class to the other classes. Of course, there are just as many rela-

tions of force, and just as much violence, on one side as the other. The point

is that the same struggle assumes two very different aspects, in relation to

which the victories and defeats differ. Mass movements accelerate and feed

into one another (or dim for a long while, enter long stupors), but jump from

one class to another, undergo mutation, emanate or emit new quanta that

then modify class relations, bring their overcoding and reterritorialization

into question, and run new lines of flight in new directions. Beneath the

self-reproduction of classes, there is always a variable map of masses.

Politics operates by macrodecisions and binary choices, binarized interests;

but the realm of the decidable remains very slim. Political decision making

necessarily descends into a world of microdeterminations, attractions,

and desires, which it must sound out or evaluate in a different fashion.

Beneath linear conceptions and segmentary decisions, an evaluation of

flows and their quanta. A curious passage by Michelet reproaches Francois I

for having badly evaluated the flow of emigration bringing to France large

numbers of people in struggle against the Church: Francois saw it only as

an influx of

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1933: MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY

potential soldiers, instead of perceiving a mass molecular flow which France

could have used to its own advantage by leading a different Reformation

than the one that occurred.

Problems are always like this. Good or bad, pol-

itics and its judgments are always molar, but it is the molecular and its assess-

ment that makes it or breaks it.

Now we are in a better position to draw a map. If we return to a very gen-

eral sense of the word "line," we see that there are not just two kinds of lines

but three. First, a relatively supple line of interlaced codes and territoriali-

ties; that is why we started with so-called primitive segmentarity, in which

the social space is constituted by territorial and lineal segmentations. Sec-

ond, a rigid line, which brings about a dualist organization of segments, a

concentricity of circles in resonance, and generalized overcoding; here, the

social space implies a State apparatus. This system is different from the

primitive system precisely because overcoding is not a stronger code, but a

specific procedure different from that of codes (similarly,

reterrito-rialization is not an added territory, but takes place in a different

space than that of territories, namely, overcoded geometrical space).

Third, one or several lines of flight, marked by quanta and defined by

decoding and deterritorialization (there is always something like a war
machine functioning on these lines).

This way of presenting things still has the disadvantage of making it

seem as though primitive societies came first. In truth, codes are never sep-

arable from the movement of decoding, nor are territories from the vectors

of deterritorialization traversing them. And overcoding and

reterrito-rialization do not come after. It would be more accurate to say that

there is a space in which the three kinds of closely intermingled lines

coexist, tribes, empires, and war machines. We could also put it this way:

lines of flight are primary, or the already-rigid segments are, and supple

segmentations swing between the two. Take a proposition like the following

one by the historian Pirenne about barbarian tribes: "The Barbarians did

not spontaneously hurl themselves upon the Empire. They were pushed

forward by the flood of the Hunnish advance, which in this way caused the

whole series of invasions."

On one side, we have the rigid segmentarity

of the Roman Empire, with its center of resonance and periphery, its

State, its pax romana, its geometry, its camps, its limes (boundary lines).

Then, on the horizon, there is an entirely different kind of line, the line of

the nomads who come in off the steppes, venture a fluid and active escape,

sow deterritorialization everywhere, launch flows whose quanta heat up and

are swept along by a Stateless war machine. The migrant barbarians are

indeed between the two: they come and go, cross and recross frontiers,

pillage and ransom, but also integrate themselves and reterritorialize. At

times they

1933:

MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY D 223

will subside into the empire, assigning themselves a segment of it, becom-

ing mercenaries or confederates, settling down, occupying land or carving

out their own State (the wise Visigoths). At other times, they will go over to

the nomads, allying with them, becoming indiscernible (the brilliant

Ostrogoths). Perhaps because they were constantly being defeated by the

Huns and Visigoths, the Vandals ("zone-two Goths") drew a line of flight

that made them as strong as their masters; they were the only band or mass

to cross the Mediterranean. But they were also the ones who produced the

most startling reterritorialization: an empire in Africa.

Thus it seems that

the three lines do not only coexist, but transform themselves into one

another, cross over into one another. Again, we have taken a summary

example in which the lines are illustrated by different groups. What we

have said applies all the more to cases in which all of the lines are in a single

group, a single individual.

In view of this, it would be better to talk about simultaneous states of the

abstract Machine. There is on the one hand an abstract machine of
overcoding: it defines a rigid segmentarity, a macrosegmentarity, because it

produces or rather reproduces segments, opposing them two by two, mak-

ing all the centers resonate, and laying out a divisible, homogeneous space

striated in all directions. This kind of abstract machine is linked to the

State apparatus. We do not, however, equate it with the State apparatus

itself. The abstract machine may be defined, for example, more
geomet-rico, or under other conditions by an "axiomatic"; but the State

apparatus is neither geometry nor axiomatics: it is only the assemblage of

reterritorialization effectuating the overcoding machine within given limits

and under given conditions. The most we can say is that the State apparatus

tends increasingly to identify with the abstract machine it effectuates.

This is where the notion of the totalitarian State becomes meaningful: a

State becomes totalitarian when, instead of effectuating, within its own

limits, the worldwide overcoding machine, it identifies with it, creating the

conditions for "autarky," producing a reterritorialization by "closed ves-

sel," in the artifice of the void (this is never an ideological operation, but

rather an economic and political one).

On the other hand, at the other pole, there is an abstract machine of

mutation, which operates by decoding and deterritorialization. It is what

draws the lines of flight: it steers the quantum flows, assures the connec-

tion-creation of flows, and emits new quanta. It itself is in a state of flight,

and erects war machines on its lines. If it constitutes another pole, it is

because molar or rigid segments always seal, plug, block the lines of flight,

whereas this machine is always making them flow, "between" the rigid seg-

ments and in another, submolecular, direction. But between the two poles

there is also a whole realm of properly molecular negotiation, translation,

224 D

1933: MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY

and transduction in which at times molar lines are already undermined by

fissures and cracks, and at other times lines of flight are already drawn

toward black holes, flow connections are already replaced by limitative

conjunctions, and quanta emissions are already converted into

center-points. All of this happens at the same time. It is at the same time

that lines of flight connect and continue their intensities, whip

particles-signs out of black holes; and also retreat into the swirl of

micro-black holes or molecular conjunctions that interrupt them; or

again, enter overcoded, concentricized, binarized, stable segments

arrayed around a central black hole.

What is a center or focal point of power? Answering this question will

illustrate the entanglement of the lines. We speak of the power of the army,

Church, and school, of public and private power ... Power centers obvi-

ously involve rigid segments. Each molar segment has one or more centers.

It might be objected that the segments themselves presuppose a power cen-

ter, as what distinguishes and unites them, sets them in opposition and

makes them resonate. But there is no contradiction between the segmen-

tary parts and the centralized apparatus. On the one hand, the most rigid of

segmentarities does not preclude centralization: this is because the com-

mon central point is not where all the other points melt together, but

instead acts as a point of resonance on the horizon, behind all the other

points. The State is not a point taking all the others upon itself, but a reso-

nance chamber for them all. Even when the State is totalitarian, its func-

tion as resonator for distinct centers and segments remains unchanged: the

only difference is that it takes place under closed-vessel conditions that

increase its internal reach, or couples "resonance" with a "forced move-

ment." On the other hand, and conversely, the strictest of centralizations

does not eradicate the distinctiveness of the centers, segments, and circles.

When the overcoding line is drawn, it assures the prevalence of one seg-

ment, as such, over the other (in the case of binary segmentarity), gives a

certain center a power of relative resonance over the others (in the case of

circular segmentarity), and underscores the dominant segment through

which it itself passes (in the case of linear segmentarity). Thus centraliza-

tion is always hierarchical, but hierarchy is always segmentary.

Each power center is also molecular and exercises its power on a

micrological fabric in which it exists only as diffuse, dispersed, geared

down, miniaturized, perpetually displaced, acting by fine segmentation,

working in detail and in the details of detail. Foucault's analysis of "disci-

plines" or micropowers (school, army, factory, hospital, etc.) testifies to

these "focuses of instability" where groupings and accumulations confront

each other, but also confront breakaways and escapes, and where inver-

sions occur.

What we have is no longer The Schoolmaster but the monitor,

1933:

MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY □ 225

the best student, the class dunce, the janitor, etc. No longer the general, but

the junior officers, the noncommissioned officers, the soldier inside me,

and also the malcontent: all have their own tendencies, poles, conflicts, and

relations of force. Even the warrant officer and janitor are only invoked for

explanatory purposes; for they have a molar side and a molecular side, and

make us realize that the general or the landlord also had both sides all

along. We would not say that the proper name loses its power when it enters

these zones of indiscernibility, but that it takes on a new kind of power. To

talk like Kafka, what we have is no longer the public official Klamm, but

maybe his secretary Momus, or other molecular Klamms the differences

between which, and with Klamm, are all the greater for no longer being

assignable. ("[The officials] don't always stick to the same book, yet it isn't

the books they change, but their places, and [they] have to squeeze past one

another when they change places, because there's so little room." "This

official is rarely very like Klamm, and if he were sitting in his own office at

his own desk with his name on the door I would have no more doubt at

all,"

says Barnabas, whose dream would be a uniquely molar

segmen-tarity, no matter how rigid and horrendous, as the only guarantee

of certainty and security. But he cannot but notice that the molar

segments are necessarily immersed in the molecular soup that nourishes

them and makes their outlines waver.) And every power center has this

microtexture. The microtextures—not masochism—are what explain how

the oppressed can take an active role in oppression: the workers of the

rich nations actively participate in the exploitation of the Third World,

the arming of dictatorships, and the pollution of the atmosphere.

This is not surprising since the texture lies between the line of

overcoding with rigid segments and the ultimate quantum line. It continu-

ally swings between the two, now channeling the quantum line back into

the segmented line, now causing flows and quanta to escape from the seg-

mented line. This is the third aspect of power centers, or their limit. For the

only purpose these centers have is to translate as best they can flow quanta

into line segments (only segments are totalizable, in one way or another).

But this is both the principle of their power and the basis of their impo-

tence. Far from being opposites, power and impotence complement and

reinforce each other in a kind of fascinating satisfaction that is found above

all in the most mediocre Statesmen, and defines their "glory." For they

extract glory from their shortsightedness, and power from their impotence,

because it confirms that there is no choice. The only "great" Statesmen are

those who connect with flows, like pilot-signs or particles-signs, and who

emit quanta that get out of the black holes: it is not by chance that these

men encounter each other only on lines of flight, in the act of drawing

them, sounding them out, following them, or forging ahead of them, even

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1933: MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY

though they may make a mistake and take a fall (Moses the Hebrew,

Genseric the Vandal, Genghis the Mongol, Mao the Chinese . . .). But there

is no Power regulating the flows themselves. No one dominates the growth

of the "monetary mass," or money supply. If an image of the master or an

idea of the State is projected outward to the limits of the universe, as if

something had domination over flows as well as segments, and in the same

manner, the result is a fictitious and ridiculous representation. The stock

exchange gives a better image of flows and their quanta than does the State.

Capitalists may be the masters of surplus value and its distribution, but

they do not dominate the flows from which surplus value derives. Rather,

power centers function at the points where flows are converted into seg-

ments: they are exchangers, converters, oscillators. Not that the segments

themselves are governed by a decision-making power. We have seen, on the

contrary, that segments (classes, for example) form at the conjunction of

masses and deterritorialized flows and that the most deterritorialized flow

determines the dominant segment; thus the dollar segment dominates cur-

rency, the bourgeoisie dominates capitalism, etc. Segments, then, are

themselves governed by an abstract machine. But what power centers gov-

ern are the assemblages that effectuate that abstract machine, in other

words, that continually adapt variations in mass and flow to the segments

of the rigid line, as a function of a dominant segment and dominated seg-

ments. Much perverse invention can enter into the adaptations.

This is the sense in which we would speak, for example, of banking

power (the World Bank, central banks, credit banks): if the flow of

financing-money, or credit money, involves the mass of economic transac-

tions, what banks govern is the conversion of the credit money that has

been created into segmentary payment-money that is appropriated, in

other words, coinage or State money for the purchase of goods that are

themselves segmented (the importance of the interest rate in this respect).

What banks govern is the conversion between the two kinds of money, and

the conversion of the segments of the second kind into any given good.

The same could be said of every central power. Every central power has

three aspects or zones: (1) its zone of power, relating to the segments of a

solid rigid line; (2) its zone of indiscernibility, relating to its diffusion

throughout a microphysical fabric; (3) its zone of impotence, relatingto the

flows and quanta it can only convert without being able to control or

define. It is always from the depths of its impotence that each power center

draws its power, hence their extreme maliciousness, and vanity. Better to

be a tiny quantum flow than a molar converter, oscillator, or distributor!

Returning to the example of money, the first zone is represented by the

public central banks; the second by the "indefinite series of private rela-

tions between banks and borrowers"; the third by the desiring flow of

1933:

MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY □ 227

money, whose quanta are defined by the mass of economic transactions. It

is true that the same problems are reformulated at the level of these very

transactions, in relation to other power centers. But the first zone of the

power center is always defined by the State apparatus, which is the assem-

blage that effectuates the abstract machine of molar overcoding; the sec-

ond is defined in the molecular fabric immersing this assemblage; the third

by the abstract machine of mutation, flows, and quanta.

We cannot say that one of these three lines is bad and another good, by

nature and necessarily. The study of the dangers of each line is the object of

pragmatics or schizoanalysis, to the extent that it undertakes not to repre-

sent, interpret, or symbolize, but only to make maps and draw lines, mark-

ing their mixtures as well as their distinctions. According to Nietzsche's

Zarathustra and Castaneda's Indian Don Juan, there are three or even four

dangers: first, Fear, then Clarity, then Power, and finally the great Disgust,

the longing to kill and to die, the Passion for abolition.

We can guess what

fear is. We are always afraid of losing. Our security, the great molar organi-

zation that sustains us, the arborescences we cling to, the binary machines

that give us a well-defined status, the resonances we enter into, the system

of overcoding that dominates us—we desire all that. "The values, morals,

fatherlands, religions and private certitudes our vanity and self-compla-

cency generously grant us are so many abodes the world furnishes for those

who think on that account that they stand and rest amid stable things; they

know nothing of the enormous rout they are heading for... in flight from
flight."

We flee from flight, rigidify our segments, give ourselves over to

binary logic; the harder they have been to us on one segment, the harder we

will be on another; we reterritorialize on anything available; the only

segmentarity we know is molar, at the level of the large-scale aggregates we

belong to, as well as at the level of the little groups we get into, as well as at

the level of what goes on in our most intimate and private recesses. Every-

thing is involved: modes of perception, kinds of actions, ways of moving,

life-styles, semiotic regimes. A man comes home and says, "Is the grub

ready?", and the wife answers, "What a scowl! Are you in a bad mood?":

two rigid segments in confrontation. The more rigid the segmentarity, the

more reassuring it is for us. That is what fear is, and how it makes us retreat

into the first line.

The second danger, Clarity, seems less obvious. Clarity, in effect, con-

cerns the molecular. Once again, everything is involved, even perception,

even the semiotic regime, but this time on the second line. Castaneda illus-

trates, for example, the existence of a molecular perception to which drugs

give us access (but so many things can be drugs): we attain a visual and

sonorous microperception revealing spaces and voids, like holes in the

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molar structure. That is precisely what clarity is: the distinctions that

appear in what used to seem full, the holes in what used to be compact; and

conversely, where just before we saw end points of clear-cut segments, now

there are indistinct fringes, encroachments, overlappings, migrations, acts

of segmentation that no longer coincide with the rigid segmentarity. Every-

thing now appears supple, with holes in fullness, nebulas in forms, and flut-

ter in lines. Everything has the clarity of the microscope. We think we have

understood everything, and draw conclusions. We are the new knights; we

even have a mission. A microphysics of the migrant has replaced the

macrogeometry of the sedentary. But this suppleness and clarity do not

only present dangers, they are themselves a danger. First, supple segmen-

tarity runs the risk of reproducing in miniature the affections, the affecta-

tions, of the rigid: the family is replaced by a community, conjugality by a

regime of exchange and migration; worse, micro-Oedipuses crop up,

microfascisms lay down the law, the mother feels obliged to titillate her

child, the father becomes a mommy. A dark light that falls from no star and

emanates such sadness: this shifting segmentarity derives directly from the

most rigid, for which it is indirect compensation. The more molar the

aggregates become, the more molecular become their elements and the

relations between their elements: molecular man for molar humanity. One

deterritorializes, massifies, but only in order to knot and annul the mass

movements and movements of deterritorialization, to invent all kinds of

marginal reterritorializations even worse than the others. But above all,

supple segmentarity brings dangers of its own that do not merely reproduce

in small scale the dangers of molar segmentarity, which do not derive from

them or compensate for them. As we have seen, microfascisms have a spe-

cificity of their own that can crystallize into a macro fascism, but may also

float along the supple line on their own account and suffuse every little cell.

A multitude of black holes may very well not become centralized, and acts

instead as viruses adapting to the most varied situations, sinking voids in

molecular perceptions and semiotics. Interactions without resonance.

Instead of the great paranoid fear, we are trapped in a thousand little mono-

manias, self-evident truths, and clarities that gush from every black hole

and no longer form a system, but are only rumble and buzz, blinding lights

giving any and everybody the mission of self-appointed judge, dispenser of

justice, policeman, neighborhood SS man. We have overcome fear, we have

sailed from the shores of security, only to enter a system that is no less

concentricized, no less organized: the system of petty insecurities that

leads everyone to their own black hole in which to turn dangerous, possess-

ing a clarity on their situation, role, and mission even more disturbing than

the certitudes of the first line.

Power (Pouvoir) is the third danger, because it is on both lines simultane-

1933:

MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY D 229

ously. It stretches from the rigid segments with their overcoding and reso-

nance to the fine segmentations with their diffusion and interactions, and

back again. Every man of power jumps from one line to the other, alternat-

ing between a petty and a lofty style, the rogue's style and the grandiloquent

style, drugstore demagoguery and the imperialism of the high-ranking gov-

ernment man. But this whole chain and web of power is immersed in a

world of mutant flows that eludes them. It is precisely its impotence that

makes power so dangerous. The man of power will always want to stop the

lines of flight, and to this end to trap and stabilize the mutation machine in

the overcoding machine. But he can do so only by creating a void, in other

words, by first stabilizing the overcoding machine itself by containing it

within the local assemblage charged with effectuating it, in short, by giving

the assemblage the dimensions of the machine. This is what takes place in

the artificial conditions of totalitarianism or the "closed vessel."

But there is a fourth danger as well, and this is the one that interests us

most, because it concerns the lines of flight themselves. We may well have

presented these lines as a sort of mutation or creation drawn not only in the

imagination but also in the very fabric of social reality; we may well have

attributed to them the movement of the arrow and the speed of an

absolute—but it would be oversimplifying to believe that the only risk they

fear and confront is allowing themselves to be recaptured in the end, letting

themselves be sealed in, tied up, reknotted, reterritorialized. They them-

selves emanate a strange despair, like an odor of death and immolation, a

state of war from which one returns broken: they have their own dangers

distinct from the ones previously discussed. This is exactly what led

Fitzgerald to say: "I had a feeling that I was standing at twilight on a

deserted range, with an empty rifle in my hands and the targets down. No

problem set—simply a silence with only the sound of my own breathing.

... My self-immolation was something sodden-dark."

Why is the line of

flight a war one risks coming back from defeated, destroyed, after having

destroyed everything one could? This, precisely, is the fourth danger: the

line of flight crossing the wall, getting out of the black holes, but instead of

connecting with other lines and each time augmenting its valence, turning
to destruction, abolition pure and simple, the passion of abolition. Like

Kleist's line of flight, and the strange war he wages; like suicide, double sui-

cide, a way out that turns the line of flight into a line of death.

We are not invoking any kind of death drive. There are no internal

drives in desire, only assemblages. Desire is always assembled; it is what

the assemblage determines it to be. The assemblage that draws lines of

flight is on the same level as they are, and is of the war machine type. Muta-

tions spring from this machine, which in no way has war as its object, but

rather the emission of quanta of deterritorialization, the passage of mutant

230 D

1933: MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY

flows (in this sense, every creation is brought about by a war machine).

There are many reasons to believe that the war machine is of a different ori-

gin, is a different assemblage, than the State apparatus. It is of nomadic ori-

gin and is directed against the State apparatus. One of the fundamental

problems of the State is to appropriate this war machine that is foreign to it

and make it a piece in its apparatus, in the form of a stable military institu-

tion; and the State has always encountered major difficulties in this. It is

precisely when the war machine has reached the point that it has no other

object but war, it is when it substitutes destruction for mutation, that it

frees the most catastrophic charge. Mutation is in no way a transformation

of war; on the contrary, war is like the fall or failure of mutation, the only

object left for the war machine after it has lost its power to change. War, it

must be said, is only the abominable residue of the war machine, either

after it has allowed itself to be appropriated by the State apparatus, or even

worse, has constructed itself a State apparatus capable only of destruction.

When this happens, the war machine no longer draws mutant lines of

flight, but a pure, cold line of abolition. (Later, we will propose a theory of

the complex relation between the war machine and war.)

This brings us back to the paradox of fascism, and the way in which fas-

cism differs from totalitarianism. For totalitarianism is a State affair: it

essentially concerns the relation between the State as a localized assem-

blage and the abstract machine of overcoding it effectuates. Even in the

case of a military dictatorship, it is a State army, not a war machine, that

takes power and elevates the State to the totalitarian stage. Totalitarianism

is quintessentially conservative. Fascism, on the other hand, involves a war

machine. When fascism builds itself a totalitarian State, it is not in the

sense of a State army taking power, but of a war machine taking over the

State. A bizarre remark by Virilio puts us on the trail: in fascism, the State

is far less totalitarian than it is suicidal. There is in fascism a realized nihil-

ism. Unlike the totalitarian State, which does its utmost to seal all possible

lines of flight, fascism is constructed on an intense line of flight, which it

transforms into a line of pure destruction and abolition. It is curious that

from the very beginning the Nazis announced to Germany what they were

bringing: at once wedding bells and death, including their own death, and

the death of the Germans. They thought they would perish but that their

undertaking would be resumed, all across Europe, all over the world,

throughout the solar system. And the people cheered, not because they did

not understand, but because they wanted that death through the death of

others. Like a will to wager everything you have every hand, to stake your

own death against the death of others, and measure everything by

"deleometers." Klaus Mann's novel, Mephisto, gives samplings of entirely

ordinary Nazi speeches and conversations: "Heroism was something that

1933:

MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY D 231

was being ruled out of our lives. . . . In reality, we are not marching forward,

we are reeling, staggering. Our beloved Fiihrer is dragging us toward the

shades of darkness and everlasting nothingness. How can we poets, we who

have a special affinity for darkness and lower depths, not admire him? . . .

Fires blazing on the horizon; rivers of blood in all the streets; and the fren-

zied dancing of the survivors, of those who are still spared, around the bod-
ies of the dead!"

Suicide is presented not as a punishment but as the

crowning glory of the death of others. One can always say that it is just a

matter of foggy talk and ideology, nothing but ideology. But that is not true.

The insufficiency of economic and political definitions of fascism does not

simply imply a need to tack on vague, so-called ideological determinations.

We prefer to follow Faye's inquiry into the precise formation of Nazi state-

ments, which are just as much in evidence in politics and economics as in

the most absurd of conversations. They always contain the "stupid and

repugnant" cry, Long live death!, even at the economic level, where the

arms expansion replaces growth in consumption and where investment

veers from the means of production toward the means of pure destruction.

Paul Virilio's analysis strikes us as entirely correct in defining fascism not

by the notion of the totalitarian State but by the notion of the suicidal State:

so-called total war seems less a State undertaking than an undertaking of a

war machine that appropriates the State and channels into it a flow of abso-

lute war whose only possible outcome is the suicide of the State itself. "The

triggering of a hitherto unknown material process, one that is limitless and

aimless. . . . Once triggered, its mechanism cannot stop at peace, for the

indirect strategy effectively places the dominant powers outside the usual

categories of space and time. . . . It was in the horror of daily life and its

environment that Hitler finally found his surest means of governing, the

legitimation of his policies and military strategy; and it lasted right up to

the end, for the ruins and horrors and crimes and chaos of total war, far

from discharging the repulsive nature of its power, normally only increase

its scope. Telegram 71 is the normal outcome: If the war is lost, may the
nation perish. Here, Hitler decides to join forces with his enemies in order

to complete the destruction of his own people, by obliterating the last

remaining resources of its life-support system, civil reserves of every kind

(potable water, fuel, provisions, etc.)."

It was this reversion of the line of

flight into a line of destruction that already animated the molecular

focuses of fascism, and made them interact in a war machine instead of res-

onating in a State apparatus. A war machine that no longer had anything
but war as its object and would rather annihilate its own servants than stop

the destruction. All the dangers of the other lines pale by comparison.

1730:

BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ... D 233

Memories of a Moviegoer. I recall the fine film Willard (1972, Daniel

Mann). A "B" movie perhaps, but a fine unpopular film: unpopular be-

cause the heroes are rats. My memory of it is not necessarily accurate. I will

recount the story in broad outline. Willard lives with his authoritarian

mother in the old family house. Dreadful Oedipal atmosphere. His mother

orders him to destroy a litter of rats. He spares one (or two or several). After

a violent argument, the mother, who "resembles" a dog, dies. The house is

coveted by a businessman, and Willard is in danger of losing it. He likes the

principal rat he saved, Ben, who proves to be of prodigious intelligence.

There is also a white female rat, Ben's companion. Willard spends all his

free time with them. They multiply. Willard takes the rat pack, led by Ben,

to the home of the businessman, who is put to a terrible death. But he fool-

ishly takes his two favorites to the office with him and has no choice but to

let the employees kill the white rat. Ben escapes, after throwing Willard a

long, hard glare. Willard then experiences a pause in his destiny, in his
becoming-rat. He tries with all his might to remain among humans. He

even responds to the advances of a young woman in the office who bears a

strong "resemblance" to a rat—but it is only a resemblance. One day when

he has invited the young woman over, all set to be conjugalized,

reoedi-palized, Ben suddenly reappears, full of hate. Willard tries to

drive him away, but succeeds only in driving away the young woman: he

then is lured to the basement by Ben, where a pack of countless rats is

waiting to tear him to shreds. It is like a tale; it is never disturbing.

It is all there: there is a becoming-animal not content to proceed by

resemblance and for which resemblance, on the contrary, would represent

an obstacle or stoppage; the proliferation of rats, the pack, brings a

becoming-molecular that undermines the great molar powers of family,

career, and conjugality; there is a sinister choice since there is a "favorite"

in the pack with which a kind of contract of alliance, a hideous pact, is

made; there is the institution of an assemblage, a war machine or criminal

machine, which can reach the point of self-destruction; there is a circula-

tion of impersonal affects, an alternate current that disrupts signifying

projects as well as subjective feelings, and constitutes a nonhuman sexual-

ity; and there is an irresistible deterritorialization that forestalls attempts

at professional, conjugal, or Oedipal reterritorialization. (Are there Oedi-

pal animals with which one can "play Oedipus," play family, my little dog,

my little cat, and then other animals that by contrast draw us into an irre-

sistible becoming? Or another hypothesis: Can the same animal be taken

up by two opposing functions and movements, depending on the case?)

Memories of a Naturalist. One of the main problems of natural history

was to conceptualize the relationships between animals. It is very different

234 □ 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . . .

in this respect from later evolutionism, which defined itself in terms of

genealogy, kinship, descent, and filiation. As we know, evolutionism would

arrive at the idea of an evolution that does not necessarily operate by

filiation. But it was unavoidable that it begin with the genealogical motif.

Darwin himself treats the evolutionist theme of kinship and the naturalist

theme of the sum and value of differences or resemblances as very separate

things: groups that are equally related can display highly variable degrees

of difference with respect to the ancestor. Precisely because natural history

is concerned primarily with the sum and value of differences, it can con-

ceive of progressions and regressions, continuities and major breaks, but

not an evolution in the strict sense, in other words, the possibility of a

descent the degrees of modification of which depend on external condi-

tions. Natural history can think only in terms of relationships (between A

and B), not in terms of production (from A to x).

But something very important transpires at the level of relationships.

For natural history conceives of the relationships between animals in two

ways: series and structure. In the case of a series, I say a resembles b, b

resembles c, etc.; all of these terms conform in varying degrees to a single,

eminent term, perfection, or quality as the principle behind the series. This

is exactly what the theologians used to call an analogy of proportion. In the

case of a structure, I say a is to b as c is to d; and each of these relationships

realizes after its fashion the perfection under consideration: gills are to

breathing under water as lungs are to breathing air; or the heart is to gills as

the absence of a heart is to tracheas [in insects]. . . This is an analogy of pro-

portionality. In the first case, I have resemblances that differ from one

another in a single series, and between series. In the second case, I have dif-

ferences that resemble each other within a single structure, and between

structures. The first form of analogy passes for the most sensible and popu-

lar, and requires imagination; but the kind of imagination it requires is a

studious one that has to take branchings in the series into account, fill in

apparent ruptures, ward off false resemblances and graduate the true ones,

and take both progressions and regressions or degraduations into account.

The second form of analogy is considered royal because it requires instead

all the resources of understanding (entendement), in order to define equiv-

alent relations by discovering, on the one hand, the independent variables

that can be combined to form a structure and, on the other hand, the corre-

lates that entail one another within each structure. As different as they are,

the two themes of series and structure have always coexisted in natural his-

tory; in appearance contradictory, in practice they have reached a more or

less stable compromise.

In the same way, the two figures of analogy coex-

isted in the minds of the theologians in various equilibriums. This is

because in both cases Nature is conceived as an enormous mimesis: either

1730:

BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ... D 235

in the form of a chain of beings perpetually imitating one another, progres-

sively and regressively, and tending toward the divine higher term they all

imitate by graduated resemblance, as the model for and principle behind

the series; or in the form of a mirror Imitation with nothing left to imitate

because it itself is the model everything else imitates, this time by ordered

difference. (This mimetic or mimological vision is what made the idea of

an evolution-production possible at that moment.)

This problem is in no way behind us. Ideas do not die. Not that they

survive simply as archaisms. At a given moment they may reach a scien-

tific stage, and then lose that status or emigrate to other sciences. Their

application and status, even their form and content, may change; yet they

retain something essential throughout the process, across the displace-

ment, in the distribution of a new domain. Ideas are always reusable,

because they have been usable before, but in the most varied of actual

modes. For, on the one hand, the relationships between animals are the

object not only of science but also of dreams, symbolism, art and poetry,

practice and practical use. And on the other hand, the relationships

between animals are bound up with the relations between man and ani-

mal, man and woman, man and child, man and the elements, man and the

physical and microphysical universe. The twofold idea "series-structure"

crosses a scientific threshold at a certain moment; but it did not start there

and it does not stay there, or else crosses over into other sciences,

animating, for example, the human sciences, serving in the study of

dreams, myths, and organizations. The history of ideas should never be

continuous; it should be wary of resemblances, but also of descents or

filiations; it should be content to mark the thresholds through which an

idea passes, the journeys it takes that change its nature or object. Yet the

objective relationships between animals have been applied to certain sub-

jective relations between man and animal, from the standpoint of a col-

lective imagination or a faculty of social understanding.

Jung elaborated a theory of the Archetype as collective unconscious; it

assigns the animal a particularly important role in dreams, myths, and

human collectivities. The animal is inseparable from a series exhibiting the

double aspect of progression-regression, in which each term plays the role

of a possible transformer of the libido (metamorphosis). A whole approach

to the dream follows from this; given a troubling image, it becomes a ques-

tion of integrating it into its archetypal series. That series may include fem-

inine, masculine, or infantile sequences, as well as animal, vegetable, even

elementary or molecular sequences. In contrast to natural history, man is

now no longer the eminent term of the series; that term may be an animal

for man, the lion, crab, bird of prey, or louse, in relation to a given act or

function, in accordance with a given demand of the unconscious.

236 D 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL .. .

Bachelard wrote a fine Jungian book when he elaborated the ramified

series of Lautreamont, taking into account the speed coefficient of the

metamorphoses and the degree of perfection of each term in relation to a

pure aggressiveness as the principle of the series: the serpent's fang, the

horn of the rhinoceros, the dog's tooth, the owl's beak; and higher up, the

claw of the eagle or the vulture, the pincer of the crab, the legs of the louse,

the suckers of the octopus. Throughout Jung's work a process of mimesis

brings nature and culture together in its net, by means of analogies of pro-

portion in which the series and their terms, and above all the animals occu-

pying a middle position, assure cycles of conversion nature-culture-nature:

archetypes as "analogical representations."

Is it by chance that structuralism so strongly denounced the prestige

accorded the imagination, the establishment of resemblances in a series,

the imitation pervading the entire series and carrying it to its term, and

the identification with this final term? Nothing is more explicit than

Levi-Strauss's famous texts on totemism: transcend external resem-

blances to arrive at internal homologies.

It is no longer a question of

instituting a serial organization of the imaginary, but instead a symbolic

and structural order of understanding. It is no longer a question of gradu-

ating resemblances, ultimately arriving at an identification between Man

and Animal at the heart of a mystical participation. It is a question of

ordering differences to arrive at a correspondence of relations. The ani-

mal is distributed according to differential relations or distinctive oppo-

sitions between species; the same goes for human beings, according to the

groups considered. When analyzing the institution of the totem, we do

not say that this group of people identifies with that animal species. We

say that what group A is to group B, species A' is to species B'. This method

is profoundly different from the preceding one: given two human groups,

each with its totem animal, we must discover the way in which the two

totems entertain relations analogous to those between the two groups—

the Crow is to the Falcon ...

The method also applies to Man-child, man-woman relations, etc. If we

note, for example, that the warrior has a certain astonishing relation to the

young woman, we refrain from establishing an imaginary series tying the

two together; instead, we look for a term effecting an equivalence of rela-

tions. Thus Vernant can say that marriage is to the woman what war is to

the man. The result is a homology between the virgin who refuses marriage

and the warrior who disguises himself as a woman.

In short, symbolic

understanding replaces the analogy of proportion with an analogy of pro-

portionality; the serialization of resemblances with a structuration of dif-

ferences; the identification of terms with an equality of relations; the

metamorphoses of the imagination with conceptual metaphors; the great

1730:

BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 237

continuity between nature and culture with a deep rift distributing corre-

spondences without resemblance between the two; the imitation of a pri-

mal model with a mimesis that is itself primary and without a model. A

man can never say: "I am a bull, a wolf.. ." But he can say: "I am to a

woman what the bull is to a cow, I am to another man what the wolf is to the

sheep." Structuralism represents a great revolution; the whole world

becomes more rational. Levi-Strauss is not content to grant the structural

model all the prestige of a true classification system; he relegates the serial

model to the dark domain of sacrifice, which he depicts as illusory, even

devoid of good sense. The serial theme of sacrifice must yield to the struc-
tural theme of the institution of the totem, correctly understood. But here,

as in natural history, many compromises are reached between archetypal

series and symbolic structures.

Memories of a Bergsonian. None of the preceding satisfies us, from our

restricted viewpoint. We believe in the existence of very special becom-

ings-animal traversing human beings and sweeping them away, affecting

the animal no less than the human. "From 1730 to 1735, all we hear about

are vampires." Structuralism clearly does not account for these becomings,

since it is designed precisely to deny or at least denigrate their existence: a

correspondence of relations does not add up to a becoming. When

structuralism encounters becomings of this kind pervading a society, it

sees them only as phenomena of degradation representing a deviation

from the true order and pertaining to the adventures of diachrony. Yet in

his study of myths, Levi-Strauss is always encountering these rapid acts by

which a human becomes animal at the same time as the animal becomes

... (Becomes what? Human, or something else?). It is always possible to try

to explain these blocks ofbecomingby a correspondence between two rela-

tions, but to do so most certainly impoverishes the phenomenon under

study. Must it not be admitted that myth as a frame of classification is quite

incapable of registering these becomings, which are more like fragments of

tales? Must we not lend credence to Jean Duvignaud's hypothesis that

there are "anomic" phenomena pervading societies that are not degrada-

tions of the mythic order but irreducible dynamisms drawing lines of flight

and implying other forms of expression than those of myth, even if myth

recapitulates them in its own terms in order to curb them?

Does it not

seem that alongside the two models, sacrifice and series, totem institution

and structure, there is still room for something else, something more secret,

more subterranean: the sorcerer and becomings (expressed in tales instead

of myths or rites)?

A becoming is not a correspondence between relations. But neither is it a

resemblance, an imitation, or, at the limit, an identification. The whole

238 □

1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ...

structuralist critique of the series seems irrefutable. To become is not to
progress or regress along a series. Above all, becoming does not occur in the
imagination, even when the imagination reaches the highest cosmic or
dynamic level, as in Jung or Bachelard. Becomings-animal are neither
dreams nor phantasies. They are perfectly real. But which reality is at issue
here? For if becoming animal does not consist in playing animal or imitat-
ing an animal, it is clear that the human being does not "really" become an
animal any more than the animal "really" becomes something else. Becom-
ing produces nothing other than itself. We fall into a false alternative if we
say that you either imitate or you are. What is real is the becoming itself, the
block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that
which becomes passes. Becoming can and should be qualified as be-
coming-animal even in the absence of a term that would be the animal
become. The becoming-animal of the human being is real, even if the ani-
mal the human being becomes is not; and the becoming-other of the animal
is real, even if that something other it becomes is not. This is the point to
clarify: that a becoming lacks a subject distinct from itself; but also that it
has no term, since its term in turn exists only as taken up in another becom-
ing of which it is the subject, and which coexists, forms a block, with the
first. This is the principle according to which there is a reality specific to
becoming (the Bergsonian idea of a coexistence of very different "dura-
tions," superior or inferior to "ours," all of them in communication).

Finally, becoming is not an evolution, at least not an evolution by

descent and filiation. Becoming produces nothing by filiation; all filiation
is imaginary. Becoming is always of a different order than filiation. It con-
cerns alliance. If evolution includes any veritable becomings, it is in the
domain of symbioses that bring into play beings of totally different scales
and kingdoms, with no possible filiation. There is a block of becoming that
snaps up the wasp and the orchid, but from which no wasp-orchid can ever
descend. There is a block of becoming that takes hold of the cat and
baboon, the alliance between which is effected by a C virus. There is a block
of becoming between young roots and certain microorganisms, the alliance
between which is effected by the materials synthesized in the leaves
(rhizosphere). If there is originality in neoevolutionism, it is attributable in
part to phenomena of this kind in which evolution does not go from some-
thing less differentiated to something more differentiated, in which it
ceases to be a hereditary filiative evolution, becoming communicative or
contagious. Accordingly, the term we would prefer for this form of evolu-
tion between heterogeneous terms is "involution," on the condition that
involution is in no way confused with regression. Becoming is
involu-tionary, involution is creative. To regress is to move in the
direction of

1730:

BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ... D 239

something less differentiated. But to involve is to form a block that runs its

own line "between" the terms in play and beneath assignable relations.

Neoevolutionism seems important for two reasons: the animal is

defined not by characteristics (specific, generic, etc.) but by populations

that vary from milieu to milieu or within the same milieu; movement

occurs not only, or not primarily, by filiative productions but also by

transversal communications between heterogeneous populations.

Becoming is a rhizome, not a classificatory or genealogical tree. Becom-

ing is certainly not imitating, or identifying with something; neither is it

regressing-progressing; neither is it corresponding, establishing corre-

sponding relations; neither is it producing, producing a filiation or pro-

ducing through filiation. Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its

own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, "appearing," "being," "equal-

ing," or "producing."

Memories of a Sorcerer, I. A becoming-animal always involves a pack, a

band, a population, a peopling, in short, a multiplicity. We sorcerers have

always known that. It may very well be that other agencies, moreover very

different from one another, have a different appraisal of the animal. One

may retain or extract from the animal certain characteristics: species and

genera, forms and functions, etc. Society and the State need animal charac-

teristics to use for classifying people; natural history and science need char-

acteristics in order to classify the animals themselves. Serialism and

structuralism either graduate characteristics according to their resem-

blances, or order them according to their differences. Animal characteris-

tics can be mythic or scientific. But we are not interested in characteristics;

what interests us are modes of expansion, propagation, occupation, conta-

gion, peopling. I am legion. The Wolf-Man fascinated by several wolves

watching him. What would a lone wolf be? Or a whale, a louse, a rat, a fly?

Beelzebub is the Devil, but the Devil as lord of the flies. The wolf is not fun-

damentally a characteristic or a certain number of characteristics; it is a

wolfing. The louse is a lousing, and so on. What is a cry independent of the

population it appeals to or takes as its witness? Virginia Woolfs experi-

ences herself not as a monkey or a fish but as a troop of monkeys, a school of

fish, according to her variable relations of becoming with the people she

approaches. We do not wish to say that certain animals live in packs. We

want nothing to do with ridiculous evolutionary classifications a la Lorenz,

according to which there are inferior packs and superior societies. What we

are saying is that every animal is fundamentally a band, a pack. That it has

pack modes, rather than characteristics, even if further distinctions within

these modes are called for. It is at this point that the human being encoun-

ters the animal. We do not become animal without a fascination for the

240 □

1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL . ..

pack, for multiplicity. A fascination for the outside? Or is the multiplicity

that fascinates us already related to a multiplicity dwelling within us? In

one of his masterpieces, H. P. Lovecraft recounts the story of Randolph

Carter, who feels his "self reel and who experiences a fear worse than that

of annihilation: "Carters of forms both human and non-human, vertebrate

and invertebrate, conscious and mindless, animal and vegetable. And

more, there were Carters having nothing in common with earthly life, but

moving outrageously amidst backgrounds of other planets and systems

and galaxies and cosmic continua. .. . Merging with nothingness is peace-

ful oblivion; but to be aware of existence and yet to know that one is no

longer a definite being distinguished from other beings," nor from all of the

becomings running through us, "that is the nameless summit of agony and

dread."

Hofmannsthal, or rather Lord Chandos, becomes fascinated with

a "people" of dying rats, and it is in him, through him, in the interstices of

his disrupted self that the "soul of the animal bares its teeth at monsterous

fate":

not pity, but unnatural participation. Then a strange imperative

wells up in him: either stop writing, or write like a rat. . . If the writer is a

sorcerer, it is because writing is a becoming, writing is traversed by strange

becomings that are not becomings-writer, but becomings-rat,

becomings-insect, becomings-wolf, etc. We will have to explain why. Many

suicides by writers are explained by these unnatural participations, these

unnatural nuptials. Writers are sorcerers because they experience the

animal as the only population before which they are responsible in

principle. The German preromantic Karl Philipp Moritz feels responsible

not for the calves that die but before the calves that die and give him the

incredible feeling of an unknown Nature—affect? For the affect is not a

personal feeling, nor is it a characteristic; it is the effectuation of a power

of the pack that throws the self into upheaval and makes it reel. Who has

not known the violence of these animal sequences, which uproot one from

humanity, if only for an instant, making one scrape at one's bread like a

rodent or giving one the yellow eyes of a feline? A fearsome involution

calling us toward unheard-of becomings. These are not regressions,

although fragments of regression, sequences of regression may enter in.

We must distinguish three kinds of animals. First, individuated ani-

mals, family pets, sentimental, Oedipal animals each with its own petty

history, "my" cat, "my" dog. These animals invite us to regress, draw us

into a narcissistic contemplation, and they are the only kind of animal psy-

choanalysis understands, the better to discover a daddy, a mommy, a little

brother behind them (when psychoanalysis talks about animals, animals

learn to laugh): anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool. And then there is a

second kind: animals with characteristics or attributes; genus, classifica-

tion, or State animals; animals as they are treated in the great divine myths,

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BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 241

in such a way as to extract from them series or structures, archetypes or

models (Jung is in any event profounder than Freud). Finally, there are

more demonic animals, pack or affect animals that form a multiplicity, a

becoming, a population, a tale . . . Or once again, cannot any animal be

treated in all three ways? There is always the possibility that a given animal,

a louse, a cheetah or an elephant, will be treated as a pet, my little beast.

And at the other extreme, it is also possible for any animal to be treated in

the mode of the pack or swarm; that is our way, fellow sorcerers. Even the

cat, even the dog. And the shepherd, the animal trainer, the Devil, may

have a favorite animal in the pack, although not at all in the way we were

just discussing. Yes, any animal is or can be a pack, but to varying degrees

of vocation that make it easier or harder to discover the multiplicity, or

multiplicity-grade, an animal contains (actually or virtually according to

the case). Schools, bands, herds, populations are not inferior social forms;

they are affects and powers, involutions that grip every animal in a becom-

ing just as powerful as that of the human being with the animal.

Jorge Luis Borges, an author renowned for his excess of culture, botched

at least two books, only the titles of which are nice: first, A Universal His-
tory of Infamy, because he did not see the sorcerer's fundamental distinc-

tion between deception and treason (becomings-animal are there from the

start, on the treason side); second, his Manual de zoolog'iafantastica, where

he not only adopts a composite and bland image of myth but also elimi-

nates all of the problems of the pack and the corresponding

becoming-animal of the human being: "We have deliberately excluded

from this manual legends of transformations of the human being, the
lobizbn, the werewolf, etc."

Borges is interested only in characteristics,

even the most fantastic ones, whereas sorcerers know that werewolves are

bands, and vampires too, and that bands transform themselves into one

another. But what exactly does that mean, the animal as band or pack?

Does a band not imply a filiation, bringing us back to the reproduction of

given characteristics? How can we conceive of a peopling, a propagation, a

becoming that is without filiation or hereditary production? A multiplicity

without the unity of an ancestor? It is quite simple; everybody knows it,

but it is discussed only in secret. We oppose epidemic to filiation,

contagion to heredity, peopling by contagion to sexual reproduction,

sexual production. Bands, human or animal, proliferate by contagion,

epidemics, battlefields, and catastrophes. Like hybrids, which are in

themselves sterile, born of a sexual union that will not reproduce itself,

but which begins over again every time, gaining that much more ground.

Unnatural participations or nuptials are the true Nature spanning the

kingdoms of nature. Propagation by epidemic, by contagion, has nothing

to do with filiation by heredity, even if the two themes intermingle and

require each other. The vampire

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does not filiate, it infects. The difference is that contagion, epidemic,

involves terms that are entirely heterogeneous: for example, a human

being, an animal, and a bacterium, a virus, a molecule, a microorganism.

Or in the case of the truffle, a tree, a fly, and a pig. These combinations are

neither genetic nor structural; they are interkingdoms, unnatural partici-

pations. That is the only way Nature operates—against itself. This is a far

cry from filiative production or hereditary reproduction, in which the only

differences retained are a simple duality between sexes within the same

species, and small modifications across generations. For us, on the other

hand, there are as many sexes as there are terms in symbiosis, as many dif-

ferences as elements contributing to a process of contagion. We know that

many beings pass between a man and a woman; they come from different

worlds, are borne on the wind, form rhizomes around roots; they cannot be

understood in terms of production, only in terms of becoming. The Uni-

verse does not function by filiation. All we are saying is that animals are

packs, and that packs form, develop, and are transformed by contagion.

These multiplicities with heterogeneous terms, cofunctioning by conta-

gion, enter certain assemblages; it is there that human beings effect their

becomings-animal. But we should not confuse these dark assemblages,

which stir what is deepest within us, with organizations such as the institu-

tion of the family and the State apparatus. We could cite hunting societies,

war societies, secret societies, crime societies, etc. Becomings-animal are

proper to them. We will not expect to find filiative regimes of the family

type or modes of classification and attribution of the State or pre-State

type or even serial organizations of the religious type. Despite appearances

and possible confusions, this is not the site of origin or point of application

for myths. These are tales, or narratives and statements of becoming. It is

therefore absurd to establish a hierarchy even of animal collectivities from

the standpoint of a whimsical evolutionism according to which packs are

lower on the scale and are superseded by State or familial societies. On the

contrary, there is a difference in nature. The origin of packs is entirely dif-

ferent from that of families and States; they continually work them from

within and trouble them from without, with other forms of content, other

forms of expression. The pack is simultaneously an animal reality, and the

reality of the becoming-animal of the human being; contagion is simulta-

neously an animal peopling, and the propagation of the animal peopling of

the human being. The hunting machine, the war machine, the crime

machine entail all kinds of becomings-animal that are not articulated in

myth, still less in totemism. Dumezil showed that becomings of this kind

pertain essentially to the man of war, but only insofar as he is external to

families and States, insofar as he upsets filiations and classifications. The

war machine is always exterior to the State, even when the State uses it,

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BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ... D 243

appropriates it. The man of war has an entire becoming that implies multi-

plicity, celerity, ubiquity, metamorphosis and treason, the power of affect.

Wolf-men, bear-men, wildcat-men, men of every animality, secret brother-

hoods, animate the battlefields. But so do the animal packs used by men in

battle, or which trail the battles and take advantage of them. And together

they spread contagion.

There is a complex aggregate: the

becoming-animal of men, packs of animals, elephants and rats, winds and

tempests, bacteria sowing contagion. A single Furor. War contained

zoological sequences before it became bacteriological. It is in war, famine,

and epidemic that werewolves and vampires proliferate. Any animal can

be swept up in these packs and the corresponding becomings; cats have

been seen on the battlefield, and even in armies. That is why the distinction

we must make is less between kinds of animals than between the different

states according to which they are integrated into family institutions,

State apparatuses, war machines, etc. (and what is the relation of the

writing machine and the musical machine to becomings-animal?)

Memories of a Sorcerer, II. Our first principle was: pack and contagion,

the contagion of the pack, such is the path becoming-animal takes. But a

second principle seemed to tell us the opposite: wherever there is multipli-

city, you will also find an exceptional individual, and it is with that individ-

ual that an alliance must be made in order to become-animal. There may be

no such thing as a lone wolf, but there is a leader of the pack, a master of the

pack, or else the old deposed head of the pack now living alone, there is the

Loner, and there is the Demon. Willard has his favorite, the rat Ben, and

only becomes-rat through his relation with him, in a kind of alliance of

love, then of hate. Moby-Dick in its entirety is one of the greatest master-

pieces of becoming; Captain Ahab has an irresistible becoming-whale, but

one that bypasses the pack or the school, operating directly through a mon-

strous alliance with the Unique, the Leviathan, Moby-Dick. There is

always a pact with a demon; the demon sometimes appears as the head of

the band, sometimes as the Loner on the sidelines of the pack, and some-

times as the higher Power (Puissance) of the band. The exceptional individ-

ual has many possible positions. Kafka, another great author of real

becomings-animal, sings of mouse society; but Josephine, the mouse

singer, sometimes holds a privileged position in the pack, sometimes a

position outside the pack, and sometimes slips into and is lost in the ano-

nymity of the collective statements of the pack.

In short, every Animal

has its Anomalous. Let us clarify that: every animal swept up in its pack or

multiplicity has its anomalous. It has been noted that the origin of the word
anomal ("anomalous"), an adjective that has fallen into disuse in French,

is very different from that of anormal ("abnormal"): a-normal, a Latin

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adjective lacking a noun in French, refers to that which is outside rules or

goes against the rules, whereas an-omalie, a Greek noun that has lost its

adjective, designates the unequal, the coarse, the rough, the cutting edge of

deterritorialization.

The abnormal can be defined only in terms of char-

acteristics, specific or generic; but the anomalous is a position or set of

positions in relation to a multiplicity. Sorcerers therefore use the old adjec-

tive "anomalous" to situate the positions of the exceptional individual in

the pack. It is always with the Anomalous, Moby-Dick or Josephine, that

one enters into alliance to become-animal.

It does seem as though there is a contradiction: between the pack and the

loner; between mass contagion and preferential alliance; between pure

multiplicity and the exceptional individual; between the aleatory aggre-

gate and a predestined choice. And the contradiction is real: Ahab chooses

Moby-Dick, in a choosing that exceeds him and comes from elsewhere, and

in so doing breaks with the law of the whalers according to which one

should first pursue the pack. Penthesilea shatters the law of the pack, the

pack of women, the pack of she-dogs, by choosing Achilles as her favorite

enemy. Yet it is by means of this anomalous choice that each enters into his

or her becoming-animal, the becoming-dog of Penthesilea, the

becoming-whale of Captain Ahab. We sorcerers know quite well that the

contradictions are real but that real contradictions are not just for laughs.

For the whole question is this: What exactly is the nature of the

anomalous? What function does it have in relation to the band, to the pack?

It is clear that the anomalous is not simply an exceptional individual; that

would be to equate it with the family animal or pet, the Oedipalized animal

as psychoanalysis sees it, as the image of the father, etc. Ahab's Moby-Dick

is not like the little cat or dog owned by an elderly woman who honors

and cherishes it. Lawrence's becoming-tortoise has nothing to do with a

sentimental or domestic relation. Lawrence is another of the writers who

leave us troubled and filled with admiration because they were able to tie

their writing to real and unheard-of becomings. But the objection is raised

against Lawrence: "Your tortoises aren't real!" And he answers: Possibly,

but my becoming is, my becoming is real, even and especially if you have

no way of judging it, because you're just little house dogs . . .

The

anomalous, the preferential element in the pack, has nothing to do with

the preferred, domestic, and psychoanalytic individual. Nor is the

anomalous the bearer of a species presenting specific or generic

characteristics in their purest state; nor is it a model or unique specimen;

nor is it the perfection of a type incarnate; nor is it the eminent term of a

series; nor is it the basis of an absolutely harmonious correspondence. The

anomalous is neither an individual nor a species; it has only affects, it has

neither familiar or subjectified feelings, nor specific or significant

characteristics. Human tenderness is as foreign to it

1730:

BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ... D 245

as human classifications. Lovecraft applies the term "Outsider" to this

thing or entity, the Thing, which arrives and passes at the edge, which is lin-

ear yet multiple, "teeming, seething, swelling, foaming, spreading like an

infectious disease, this nameless horror."

If the anomalous is neither an individual nor a species, then what is it? It

is a phenomenon, but a phenomenon of bordering. This is our hypothesis:

a multiplicity is defined not by the elements that compose it in extension,

not by the characteristics that compose it in comprehension, but by the

lines and dimensions it encompasses in "intension." If you change dimen-

sions, if you add or subtract one, you change multiplicity. Thus there is a

borderline for each multiplicity; it is in no way a center but rather the envel-

oping line or farthest dimension, as a function of which it is possible to

count the others, all those lines or dimensions constitute the pack at a given

moment (beyond the borderline, the multiplicity changes nature). That is

what Captain Ahab says to his first mate: I have no personal history with

Moby-Dick, no revenge to take, any more than I have a myth to play out;

but I do have a becoming! Moby-Dick is neither an individual nor a genus;

he is the borderline, and I have to strike him to get at the pack as a whole, to

reach the pack as a whole and pass beyond it. The elements of the pack are

only imaginary "dummies," the characteristics of the pack are only sym-

bolic entities; all that counts is the borderline—the anomalous. "To me,

the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me." The white wall. "Some-

times I think there is naught beyond. But 'tis enough."

That the anoma-

lous is the borderline makes it easier for us to understand the various

positions it occupies in relation to the pack or the multiplicity it borders,

and the various positions occupied by a fascinated Self (Moi). It is now

even possible to establish a classification system for packs while avoiding

the pitfalls of an evolutionism that sees them only as an inferior collective

stage (instead of taking into consideration the particular assemblages they

bring into play). In any event, the pack has a borderline, and an anomalous

position, whenever in a given space an animal is on the line or in the act of

drawing the line in relation to which all the other members of the pack will

fall into one of two halves, left or right: a peripheral position, such that it is

impossible to tell if the anomalous is still in the band, already outside the

band, or at the shifting boundary of the band. Sometimes each and every

animal reaches this line or occupies this dynamic position, as in a swarm of

mosquitoes, where "each individual moves randomly unless it sees the rest

of [the swarm] in the same half-space; then it hurries to re-enter the group.

Thus stability is assured in catastrophe by a barrier."**' Sometimes it is a

specific animal that draws and occupies the borderline, as leader of the

pack. Sometimes the borderline is defined or doubled by a being of another

nature that no longer belongs to the pack, or never belonged to it, and that

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represents a power of another order, potentially acting as a threat as well as

a trainer, outsider, etc. In any case, no band is without this phenomenon of

bordering, or the anomalous. It is true that bands are also undermined by

extremely varied forces that establish in them interior centers of the conju-

gal, familial, or State type, and that make them pass into an entirely differ-

ent form of sociability, replacing pack affects with family feelings or State

intelligibilities. The center, or internal black holes, assumes the principal

role. This is what evolutionism sees as progress, this adventure also befalls

bands of humans when they reconstitute group familialism, or even

authoritarianism or pack fascism.

Sorcerers have always held the anomalous position, at the edge of the

fields or woods. They haunt the fringes. They are at the borderline of the

village, or between villages. The important thing is their affinity with alli-

ance, with the pact, which gives them a status opposed to that of filiation.

The relation with the anomalous is one of alliance. The sorcerer has a

relation of alliance with the demon as the power of the anomalous. The

old-time theologians drew a clear distinction between two kinds of curses

against sexuality. The first concerns sexuality as a process of filiation

transmitting the original sin. But the second concerns it as a power of alli-

ance inspiring illicit unions or abominable loves. This differs signifi-

cantly from the first in that it tends to prevent procreation; since the

demon does not himself have the ability to procreate, he must adopt indi-

rect means (for example, being the female succubus of a man and then

becoming the male incubus of a woman, to whom he transmits the man's

semen). It is true that the relations between alliance and filiation come to

be regulated by laws of marriage, but even then alliance retains a danger-

ous and contagious power. Leach was able to demonstrate that despite all

the exceptions that seemingly disprove the rule, the sorcerer belongs first

of all to a group united to the group over which he or she exercises influ-

ence only by alliance: thus in a matrilineal group we look to the father's

side for the sorcerer or witch. And there is an entire evolution of sorcery

depending on whether the relation of alliance acquires permanence or

assumes political weight.

In order to produce werewolves in your own

family it is not enough to resemble a wolf, or to live like a wolf: the pact

with the Devil must be coupled with an alliance with another family, and

it is the return of this alliance to the first family, the reaction of this alli-

ance on the first family, that produces werewolves by feedback effect. A

fine tale by Erckmann and Chatrian, Hugues-le-loup, assembles the tradi-

tions concerning this complex situation.

The contradiction between the two themes, "contagion through the ani-

mal as pack," and "pact with the anomalous as exceptional being," is pro-

gressively fading. It is with good reason that Leach links the two concepts of

1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ... D 247

alliance and contagion, pact and epidemic. Analyzing Kachin sorcery, he

writes: "Witch influence was thought to be transmitted in the food that the

women prepared. . . . Kachin witchcraft is contagious rather than heredi-

tary ... it is associated with affinity, not filiation."

Alliance or the pact is

the form of expression for an infection or epidemic constituting the form of

content. In sorcery, blood is of the order of contagion and alliance. It can be

said that becoming-animal is an affair of sorcery because (1) it implies an

initial relation of alliance with a demon; (2) the demon functions as the

borderline of an animal pack, into which the human being passes or in

which his or her becoming takes place, by contagion; (3) this becoming

itself implies a second alliance, with another human group; (4) this new

borderline between the two groups guides the contagion of animal and

human being within the pack. There is an entire politics of

becomings-animal, as well as a politics of sorcery, which is elaborated in

assemblages that are neither those of the family nor of religion nor of the

State. Instead, they express minoritarian groups, or groups that are

oppressed, prohibited, in revolt, or always on the fringe of recognized

institutions, groups all the more secret for being extrinsic, in other words,

anomic. If becoming-animal takes the form of a Temptation, and of

monsters aroused in the imagination by the demon, it is because it is

accompanied, at its origin as in its undertaking, by a rupture with the

central institutions that have established themselves or seek to become

established.

Let us cite pell-mell, not as mixes to be made, but as different cases to be

studied: becomings-animal in the war machine, wildmen of all kinds (the

war machine indeed comes from without, it is extrinsic to the State, which

treats the warrior as an anomalous power); becomings-animal in crime

societies, leopard-men, crocodile-men (when the State prohibits tribal and

local wars); becomings-animal in riot groups (when the Church and State

are faced with peasant movements containing a sorcery component, which

they repress by setting up a whole trial and legal system designed to expose

pacts with the Devil); becomings-animal in asceticism groups, the grazing

anchorite or wild-beast anchorite (the asceticism machine is in an anoma-

lous position, on a line of flight, off to the side of the Church, and disputes

the Church's pretension to set itself up as an imperial institution);

becomings-animal in societies practicing sexual initiation of the "sacred

deflowerer" type, wolf-men, goat-men, etc. (who claim an Alliance supe-

rior and exterior to the order of families; families have to win from them

the right to regulate their own alliances, to determine them according to

relations of complementary lines of descent, and to domesticate this unbri-

dled power of alliance).

The politics of becomings-animal remains, of course, extremely ambig-

uous. For societies, even primitive societies, have always appropriated

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these becomings in order to break them, reduce them to relations of

totemic or symbolic correspondence. States have always appropriated the

war machine in the form of national armies that strictly limit the be-

comings of the warrior. The Church has always burned sorcerers, or

reintegrated anchorites into the toned-down image of a series of saints

whose only remaining relation to animals is strangely familiar, domestic.

Families have always warded off the demonic Alliance gnawing at them, in

order to regulate alliances among themselves as they see fit. We have seen

sorcerers serve as leaders, rally to the cause of despotism, create the

countersorcery of exorcism, pass over to the side of the family and descent.

But this spells the death of the sorcerer, and also the death of becoming. We

have seen becoming spawn nothing more than a big domestic dog, as in

Henry Miller's damnation ("it would be better to feign, to pretend to be an

animal, a dog for example, and catch the bone thrown to me from time to

time") or Fitzgerald's ("I will try to be a correct animal though, and if you

throw me a bone with enough meat on it I may even lick your hand"). Invert

Faust's formula: So that is what it was, the form of the traveling scholar? A

mere poodle?

Memories of a Sorcerer, III. Exclusive importance should not be

attached to becomings-animal. Rather, they are segments occupying a

median region. On the near side, we encounter becomings-woman,

becomings-child (becoming-woman, more than any other becoming, pos-

sesses a special introductory power; it is not so much that women are

witches, but that sorcery proceeds by way of this becoming-woman). On

the far side, we find becomings-elementary, -cellular, -molecular, and even

becomings-imperceptible. Toward what void does the witch's broom lead?

And where is Moby-Dick leading Ahab so silently? Lovecraft's hero

encounters strange animals, but he finally reaches the ultimate regions of a

Continuum inhabited by unnameable waves and unfindable particles. Sci-

ence fiction has gone through a whole evolution taking it from animal, veg-

etable, and mineral becomings to becomings of bacteria, viruses, mole-

cules, and things imperceptible.

The properly musical content of music is

plied by becomings-woman, becomings-child, becomings-animal; how-

ever, it tends, under all sorts of influences, having to do also with the instru-

ments, to become progressively more molecular in a kind of cosmic

lapping through which the inaudible makes itself heard and the impercep-

tible appears as such: no longer the songbird, but the sound molecule.

If the experimentation with drugs has left its mark on everyone, even

nonusers, it is because it changed the perceptive coordinates of space-time

and introduced us to a universe of microperceptions in which

becomings-molecular take over where becomings-animal leave off. Carlos

Castaneda's

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BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 249

books clearly illustrate this evolution, or rather this involution, in which

the affects of a becoming-dog, for example, are succeeded by those of a

becoming-molecular, microperceptions of water, air, etc. A man totters

from one door to the next and disappears into thin air: "All I can tell you is

that we are fluid, luminous beings made of fibers."

All so-called initiatory

journeys include these thresholds and doors where becoming itself

becomes, and where one changes becoming depending on the "hour" of the

world, the circles of hell, or the stages of a journey that sets scales, forms,

and cries in variation. From the howling of animals to the wailing of ele-

ments and particles.

Thus packs, or multiplicities, continually transform themselves into

each other, cross over into each other. Werewolves become vampires when

they die. This is not surprising, since becoming and multiplicity are the

same thing. A multiplicity is defined not by its elements, nor by a center of

unification or comprehension. It is defined by the number of dimensions it

has; it is not divisible, it cannot lose or gain a dimension without changing
its nature. Since its variations and dimensions are immanent to it, it
amounts to the same thing to say that each multiplicity is already composed
of heterogeneous terms in symbiosis, and that a multiplicity is continually
transforming itself into a string of other multiplicities, according to its
thresholds and doors. For example, the Wolf-Man's pack of wolves also

becomes a swarm of bees, and a field of anuses, and a collection of small

holes and tiny ulcerations (the theme of contagion): all these heterogene-

ous elements compose "the" multiplicity of symbiosis and becoming. If we

imagined the position of a fascinated Self, it was because the multiplicity

toward which it leans, stretching to the breaking point, is the continuation

of another multiplicity that works it and strains it from the inside. In fact,

the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities.

Each multiplicity is defined by a borderline functioning as Anomalous, but

there is a string of borderlines, a continuous line of borderlines (fiber) fol-

lowing which the multiplicity changes. And at each threshold or door, a

new pact? A fiber stretches from a human to an animal, from a human or an

animal to molecules, from molecules to particles, and so on to the imper-

ceptible. Every fiber is a Universe fiber. A fiber strung across borderlines

constitutes a line of flight or of deterritorialization. It is evident that the

Anomalous, the Outsider, has several functions: not only does it border

each multiplicity, of which it determines the temporary or local stability

(with the highest number of dimensions possible under the circum-

stances), not only is it the precondition for the alliance necessary to becom-

ing, but it also carries the transformations of becoming or crossings of

multiplicities always farther down the line of flight. Moby-Dick is the
White Wall bordering the pack; he is also the demonic Term of the Alliance;

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finally, he is the terrible Fishing Line with nothing on the other end, the line

that crosses the wall and drags the captain .. . where? Into the void . . .

The error we must guard against is to believe that there is a kind of logi-

cal order to this string, these crossings or transformations. It is already

going too far to postulate an order descending from the animal to the vege-

table, then to molecules, to particles. Each multiplicity is symbiotic; its

becoming ties together animals, plants, microorganisms, mad particles, a

whole galaxy. Nor is there a preformed logical order to these heterogenei-

ties, the Wolf-Man's wolves, bees, anuses, little scars. Of course, sorcery

always codifies certain transformations of becomings. Take a novel

steeped in the traditions of sorcery, Alexandre Dumas's Menem de loups;

in a first pact, the man of the fringes gets the Devil to agree to make his

wishes come true, with the stipulation that a lock of his hair turn red each

time he gets a wish. We are in the hair-multiplicity, hair is the borderline.

The man himself takes a position on the wolves' borderline, as leader of the

pack. Then when he no longer has a single human hair left, a second pact

makes him become-wolf himself; it is an endless becoming since he is only

vulnerable one day in the year. We are aware that between the

hair-multiplicity and the wolf-multiplicity it is always possible to induce

an order of resemblance (red like the fur of a wolf); but the resemblance

remains quite secondary (the wolf of the transformation is black, with one

white hair). In fact, there is a first multiplicity, of hair, taken up in a

becoming-red fur; and a second multiplicity, of wolves, which in turn takes

up the becoming-animal of the man. Between the two, there is threshold

and fiber, symbiosis of or passage between heterogeneities. That is how we

sorcerers operate. Not following a logical order, but following alogical con-

sistencies or compatibilities. The reason is simple. It is because no one, not

even God, can say in advance whether two borderlines will string together

or form a fiber, whether a given multiplicity will or will not cross over into

another given multiplicity, or even if given heterogeneous elements will

enter symbiosis, will form a consistent, or cofunctioning, multiplicity sus-

ceptible to transformation. No one can say where the line of flight will pass:

Will it let itself get bogged down and fall back to the Oedipal family animal,

a mere poodle? Or will it succumb to another danger, for example, turning

into a line of abolition, annihilation, self-destruction, Ahab,Ahab... ?We

are all too familiar with the dangers of the line of flight, and with its ambi-

guities. The risks are ever-present, but it is always possible to have the good

fortune of avoiding them. Case by case, we can tell whether the line is con-

sistent, in other words, whether the heterogeneities effectively function in

a multiplicity of symbiosis, whether the multiplicities are effectively trans-

formed through the becomings of passage. Let us take an example as simple

as: x starts practicing piano again. Is it an Oedipal return to childhood? Is it

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BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ... D 251

a way of dying, in a kind of sonorous abolition? Is it a new borderline, an

active line that will bring other becomings entirely different from becom-

ing or rebecoming a pianist, that will induce a transformation of all of the

preceding assemblages to which x was prisoner? Is it a way out? Is it a pact

with the Devil? Schizoanalysis, or pragmatics, has no other meaning: Make

a rhizome. But you don't know what you can make a rhizome with, you

don't know which subterranean stem is effectively going to make a rhi-

zome, or enter a becoming, people your desert. So experiment.

That's easy to say? Although there is no preformed logical order to

becomings and multiplicities, there are criteria, and the important thing is

that they not be used after the fact, that they be applied in the course of

events, that they be sufficient to guide us through the dangers. If multiplici-

ties are defined and transformed by the borderline that determines in each

instance their number of dimensions, we can conceive of the possibility of

laying them out on a plane, the borderlines succeeding one another, form-

ing a broken line. It is only in appearance that a plane of this kind "reduces"

the number of dimensions; for it gathers in all the dimensions to the extent

that flat multiplicities—which nonetheless have an increasing or decreas-
ing number of dimensions—are inscribed upon it. It is in grandiose and

simplified terms that Lovecraft attempted to pronounce sorcery's final

word: "Then the waves increased in strength and sought to improve his

understanding, reconciling him to the multiform entity of which his pres-

ent fragment was an infinitesimal part. They told him that every figure of

space is but the result of the intersection by a plane of some corresponding

figure of one more dimension—as a square is cut from a cube, or a circle

from a sphere. The cube and sphere, of three dimensions, are thus cut from

corresponding forms of four dimensions, which men know only through

guesses and dreams; and these in turn are cut from forms of five dimen-

sions, and so on up to the dizzy and reachless heights of archetypal infin-

ity."

Far from reducing the multiplicities' number of dimensions to two,

the plane of consistency cuts across them all, intersects them in order to

bring into coexistence any number of multiplicities, with any number of

dimensions. The plane of consistency is the intersection of all concrete

forms. Therefore all becomings are written like sorcerers' drawings on this

plane of consistency, which is the ultimate Door providing a way out for

them. This is the only criterion to prevent them from bogging down, or

veering into the void. The only question is: Does a given becoming reach

that point? Can a given multiplicity flatten and conserve all its dimensions

in this way, like a pressed flower that remains just as alive dry? Lawrence, in

his becoming-tortoise, moves from the most obstinate animal dynamism

to the abstract, pure geometry of scales and "cleavages of division," with-

out, however, losing any of the dynamism: he pushes becoming-tortoise all

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the way to the plane of consistency.

Everything becomes imperceptible,

everything is becoming-imperceptible on the plane of consistency, which is

nevertheless precisely where the imperceptible is seen and heard. It is the

Planomenon, or the Rhizosphere, the Criterium (and still other names, as

the number of dimensions increases). At n dimensions, it is called the

Hypersphere, the Mechanosphere. It is the abstract Figure, or rather, since

it has no form itself, the abstract Machine of which each concrete assem-

blage is a multiplicity, a becoming, a segment, a vibration. And the abstract

machine is the intersection of them all.

Waves are vibrations, shifting borderlines inscribed on the plane of con-

sistency as so many abstractions. The abstract machine of the waves. In
The Waves, Virginia Woolf—who made all of her life and work a passage, a

becoming, all kinds of becomings between ages, sexes, elements, and king-

doms—intermingles seven characters, Bernard, Neville, Louis, Jinny,

Rhoda, Suzanne, and Percival. But each of these characters, with his or her

name, its individuality, designates a multiplicity (for example, Bernard

and the school offish). Each is simultaneously in this multiplicity and at its

edge, and crosses over into the others. Percival is like the ultimate multipli-

city enveloping the greatest number of dimensions. But he is not yet the

plane of consistency. Although Rhoda thinks she sees him rising out of the

sea, no, it is not he. "When the white arm rests upon the knee it is a triangle;

now it is upright—a column; now a fountain.. .. Behind it roars the sea. It

is beyond our reach."

Each advances like a wave, but on the plane of con-

sistency they are a single abstract Wave whose vibration propagates follow-

ing a line of flight or deterritorialization traversing the entire plane (each

chapter of Woolf s novel is preceded by a meditation on an aspect of the

waves, on one of their hours, on one of their becomings).

Memories of a Theologian. Theology is very strict on the following point:

there are no werewolves, human beings cannot become animal. That is

because there is no transformation of essential forms; they are inalienable

and only entertain relations of analogy. The Devil and the witch, and the

pact between them, are no less real for that, for there is in reality a local
movement that is properly diabolical. Theology distinguishes two cases,

used as models during the Inquisition: that of Ulysses' companions, and

that of Diomedes' companions, the imaginary vision and the spell. In the

first, the subject believes him- or herself to be transformed into an animal,

pig, ox, or wolf, and the observers believe it too; but this is an internal local

movement bringing sensible images back to the imagination and bouncing

them off external meanings. In the second, the Devil "assumes" real ani-

mal bodies, even transporting the accidents and affects befalling them to

other bodies (for example, a cat or a wolf that has been taken over by the

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BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 253

Devil can receive wounds that are relayed to an exactly corresponding part

of a human body).

This is a way of saying that the human being does not

become animal in reality, but that there is nevertheless a demonic reality of

the becoming-animal of the human being. Therefore it is certain that the

demon performs local transports of all kinds. The Devil is a transporter; he

transports humors, affects, or even bodies (the Inquisition brooks no com-

promises on this power of the Devil: the witch's broom, or "the Devil take

you"). But these transports cross neither the barrier of essential forms nor

that of substances or subjects.

There is another, altogether different, problem concerning the laws of

nature that has to do not with demonology but with alchemy, and above all

physics. It is the problem of accidental forms, distinct from both essential

forms and determined subjects. For accidental forms are susceptible to
more and less: more or less charitable, but also more or less white, more or

less warm. A degree of heat is a perfectly individuated warmth distinct

from the substance or the subject that receives it. A degree of heat can enter

into composition with a degree of whiteness, or with another degree of

heat, to form a third unique individuality distinct from that of the subject.

What is the individuality of a day, a season, an event? A shorter day and a

longer day are not, strictly speaking, extensions but degrees proper to

extension, just as there are degrees proper to heat, color, etc. An accidental

form therefore has a "latitude" constituted by a certain number of

composable individuations. A degree, an intensity, is an individual, a
Haecceity that enters into composition with other degrees, other intensi-

ties, to form another individual. Can latitude be explained by the fact that

the subject participates more or less in the accidental form? But do these

degrees of participation not imply a flutter, a vibration in the form itself

that is not reducible to the properties of a subject? Moreover, if intensities

of heat are not composed by addition, it is because one must add their

respective subjects; it is the subjects that prevent the heat of the whole from

increasing. All the more reason to effect distributions of intensity, to estab-

lish latitudes that are "deformedly deformed," speeds, slownesses, and

degrees of all kinds corresponding to a body or set of bodies taken as longi-

tude: a cartography.

In short, between substantial forms and determined

subjects, between the two, there is not only a whole operation of demonic

local transports but a natural play of haecceities, degrees, intensities,

events, and accidents that compose individuations totally different from

those of the well-formed subjects that receive them.

Memories of a Spinozist, I. Substantial or essential forms have been cri-

tiqued in many different ways. Spinoza's approach is radical: Arrive at ele-

ments that no longer have either form or function, that are abstract in this

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sense even though they are perfectly real. They are distinguished solely by

movement and rest, slowness and speed. They are not atoms, in other

words, finite elements still endowed with form. Nor are they indefinitely

divisible. They are infinitely small, ultimate parts of an actual infinity, laid

out on the same plane of consistency or composition. They are not defined

by their number since they always come in infinities. However, depending

on their degree of speed or the relation of movement and rest into which

they enter, they belong to a given Individual, which may itself be part of

another Individual governed by another, more complex, relation, and so

on to infinity. There are thus smaller and larger infinities, not by virtue of

their number, but by virtue of the composition of the relation into which

their parts enter. Thus each individual is an infinite multiplicity, and the

whole of Nature is a multiplicity of perfectly individuated multiplicities.

The plane of consistency of Nature is like an immense Abstract Machine,

abstract yet real and individual; its pieces are the various assemblages and

individuals, each of which groups together an infinity of particles entering

into an infinity of more or less interconnected relations. There is therefore

a unity to the plane of nature, which applies equally to the inanimate and

the animate, the artificial and the natural. This plane has nothing to do

with a form or a figure, nor with a design or a function. Its unity has nothing

to do with a ground buried deep within things, nor with an end or a project

in the mind of God. Instead, it is a plane upon which everything is laid out,

and which is like the intersection of all forms, the machine of all functions;

its dimensions, however, increase with those of the multiplicities of indi-

vidualities it cuts across. It is a fixed plane, upon which things are dis-

tinguished from one another only by speed and slowness. A plane of

immanence or univocality opposed to analogy. The One is said with a single

meaning of all the multiple. Being expresses in a single meaning all that

differs. What we are talking about is not the unity of substance but the infinity

of the modifications that are part of one another on this unique plane of life.

The never-ending debate between Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire:

both agree at least in denouncing resemblances, or imaginary, sensible

analogies, but in Cuvier, scientific definition concerns the relations

between organs, and between organs and functions. Cuvier thus takes anal-

ogy to the scientific stage, making it an analogy of proportionality. The

unity of the plane, according to him, can only be a unity of analogy, there-

fore a transcendent unity that cannot be realized without fragmenting into

distinct branches, according to irreducible, uncrossable, heterogeneous

compositions. Baer would later add: according to noncommunicating

types of development and differentiation. The plane is a hidden plan(e) of

organization, a structure or genesis. Geoffroy has an entirely different

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BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL.. . □ 255

point of view because he goes beyond organs and functions to abstract ele-

ments he terms "anatomical," even to particles, pure materials that enter

into various combinations, forming a given organ and assuming a given

function depending on their degree of speed or slowness. Speed and slow-

ness, movement and rest, tardiness and rapidity subordinate not only the

forms of structure but also the types of development. This approach later

reappears in an evolutionist framework, with Perrier's tachygenesis and

differential rates of growth in allometry: species as kinematic entities that

are either precocious or retarded. (Even the question of fertility is less one

of form and function than speed; do the paternal chromosomes arrive early

enough to be incorporated into the nuclei?) In any case, there is a pure

plane of immanence, univocality, composition, upon which everything is

given, upon which unformed elements and materials dance that are distin-

guished from one another only by their speed and that enter into this or

that individuated assemblage depending on their connections, their rela-

tions of movement. A fixed plane of life upon which everything stirs, slows

down or accelerates. A single abstract Animal for all the assemblages that

effectuate it. A unique plane of consistency or composition for the

cephalo-pod and the vertebrate; for the vertebrate to become an Octopus or

Cuttlefish, all it would have to do is fold itself in two fast enough to fuse

the elements of the halves of its back together, then bring its pelvis up to

the nape of its neck and gather its limbs together into one of its extremities,

like "a clown who throws his head and shoulders back and walks on his

head and hands."

Plication. It is no longer a question of organs and

functions, and of a transcendent Plane that can preside over their

organization only by means of analogical relations and types of divergent

development. It is a question not of organization but of composition; not

of development or differentiation but of movement and rest, speed and

slowness. It is a question of elements and particles, which do or do not

arrive fast enough to effect a passage, a becoming or jump on the same

plane of pure immanence. And if there are in fact jumps, rifts between

assemblages, it is not by virtue of their essential irreducibility but rather

because there are always elements that do not arrive on time, or arrive

after everything is over; thus it is necessary to pass through fog, to cross

voids, to have lead times and delays, which are themselves part of the

plane of immanence. Even the failures are part of the plane. We must try to

conceive of this world in which a single fixed plane—which we shall call a

plane of absolute immobility or absolute movement—is traversed by

nonformal elements of relative speed that enter this or that individuated

assemblage depending on their degrees of speed and slowness. A plane of

consistency peopled by anonymous matter, by infinite bits of impalpable

matter entering into varying connections.

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Children are Spinozists. When Little Hans talks about a

"peepee-maker," he is referring not to an organ or an organic function but

basically to a material, in other words, to an aggregate whose elements

vary according to its connections, its relations of movement and rest, the

different individuated assemblages it enters. Does a girl have a

peepee-maker? The boy says yes, and not by analogy, nor in order to

conjure away a fear of castration. It is obvious that girls have a

peepee-maker because they effectively pee: a machinic functioning rather

than an organic function. Quite simply, the same material has different

connections, different relations of movement and rest, enters different

assemblages in the case of the boy and the girl (a girl does not pee standing

or into the distance). Does a locomotive have a peepee-maker? Yes, in yet

another machinic assemblage. Chairs don't have them: but that is because

the elements of the chair were not able to integrate this material into their

relations, or decomposed the relation with that material to the point that it

yielded something else, a rung, for example. It has been noted that for

children an organ has "a thousand vicissitudes," that it is "difficult to

localize, difficult to identify, it is in turn a bone, an engine, excrement, the

baby, a hand, daddy's heart..." This is not at all because the organ is

experienced as a part-object. It is because the organ is exactly what its

elements make it according to their relation of movement or rest, and the

way in which this relation combines with or splits off from that of

neighboring elements. This is not animism, any more than it is mechanism;

rather, it is universal machinism: a plane of consistency occupied by an

immense abstract machine comprising an infinite number of assemblages.

Children's questions are poorly understood if they are not seen as

question-machines; that is why indefinite articles play so important a role

in these questions (a belly, a child, a horse, a chair, "how is a person

made?"). Spinozism is the becoming-child of the philosopher. We call the
longitude of a body the particle aggregates belonging to that body in a given

relation; these aggregates are part of each other depending on the

composition of the relation that defines the individuated assemblage of

the body.

Memories of a Spinozist, II. There is another aspect to Spinoza. To every

relation of movement and rest, speed and slowness grouping together an

infinity of parts, there corresponds a degree of power. To the relations com-

posing, decomposing, or modifying an individual there correspond inten-

sities that affect it, augmenting or diminishing its power to act; these

intensities come from external parts or from the individual's own parts.

Affects are becomings. Spinoza asks: What can a body do? We call the lati-
tude of a body the affects of which it is capable at a given degree of power, or

rather within the limits of that degree. Latitude is made up of intensive parts

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BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 257

falling under a capacity, and longitude of extensive parts falling under a rela-
tion. In the same way that we avoided defining a body by its organs and

functions, we will avoid defining it by Species or Genus characteristics;

instead we will seek to count its affects. This kind of study is called

ethology, and this is the sense in which Spinoza wrote a true Ethics. A race-

horse is more different from a workhorse than a workhorse is from an ox.

Von Uexkull, in defining animal worlds, looks for the active and passive

affects of which the animal is capable in the individuated assemblage of

which it is a part. For example, the Tick, attracted by the light, hoists itself

up to the tip of a branch; it is sensitive to the smell of mammals, and lets

itself fall when one passes beneath the branch; it digs into its skin, at the

least hairy place it can find. Just three affects; the rest of the time the tick

sleeps, sometimes for years on end, indifferent to all that goes on in the

immense forest. Its degree of power is indeed bounded by two limits: the

optimal limit of the feast after which it dies, and the pessimal limit of the

fast as it waits. It will be said that the tick's three affects assume generic and

specific characteristics, organs and functions, legs and snout. This is true

from the standpoint of physiology, but not from the standpoint of Ethics.

Quite the contrary, in Ethics the organic characteristics derive from longi-

tude and its relations, from latitude and its degrees. We know nothing

about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects

are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with

the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by

it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in com-

posing a more powerful body.

Once again, we turn to children. Note how they talk about animals, and

are moved by them. They make a list of affects. Little Hans's horse is not

representative but affective. It is not a member of a species but an element

or individual in a machinic assemblage: draft horse-omnibus-street. It is

defined by a list of active and passive affects in the context of the

individuated assemblage it is part of: having eyes blocked by blinders, hav-

ing a bit and a bridle, being proud, having a big peepee-maker, pulling

heavy loads, being whipped, falling, making a din with its legs, biting, etc.

These affects circulate and are transformed within the assemblage: what a

horse "can do." They indeed have an optimal limit at the summit of horse-

power, but also a pessimal threshold: a horse falls down in the street! It can't

get back on its feet with that heavy load on its back, and the excessive whip-

ping; a horse is going to die!—this was an ordinary sight in those days

(Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Nijinsky lamented it). So just what is the

becoming-horse of Little Hans? Hans is also taken up in an assemblage: his

mother's bed, the paternal element, the house, the cafe across the street, the

nearby warehouse, the street, the right to go out onto the street, the winning

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of this right, the pride of winning it, but also the dangers of winning it, the

fall, shame .. . These are not phantasies or subjective reveries: it is not a

question of imitating a horse, "playing" horse, identifying with one, or

even experiencing feelings of pity or sympathy. Neither does it have to do

with an objective analogy between assemblages. The question is whether

Little Hans can endow his own elements with the relations of movement

and rest, the affects, that would make it become horse, forms and subjects

aside. Is there an as yet unknown assemblage that would be neither Hans's

nor the horse's, but that of the becoming-horse of Hans? An assemblage,

for example, in which the horse would bare its teeth and Hans might show

something else, his feet, his legs, his peepee-maker, whatever? And in what

way would that ameliorate Hans's problem, to what extent would it open a

way out that had been previously blocked? When Hofmannsthal contem-

plates the death throes of a rat, it is in him that the animal "bares his teeth at

monstrous fate." This is not a feeling of pity, as he makes clear; still less an

identification. It is a composition of speeds and affects involving entirely

different individuals, a symbiosis; it makes the rat become a thought, a

feverish thought in the man, at the same time as the man becomes a rat

gnashing its teeth in its death throes. The rat and the man are in no way the

same thing, but Being expresses them both in a single meaning in a lan-

guage that is no longer that of words, in a matter that is no longer that of

forms, in an affectability that is no longer that of subjects. Unnatural par-
ticipation. But the plane of composition, the plane of Nature, is precisely

for participations of this kind, and continually makes and unmakes their

assemblages, employing every artifice.

This is not an analogy, or a product of the imagination, but a composi-

tion of speeds and affects on the plane of consistency: a plan(e), a program,

or rather a diagram, a problem, a question-machine. Vladimir Slepian for-

mulates the "problem" in a thoroughly curious text: I'm hungry, always

hungry, a man should not be hungry, so I'll have to become a dog—but

how? This will not involve imitating a dog, nor an analogy of relations. I

must succeed in endowing the parts of my body with relations of speed and

slowness that will make it become dog, in an original assemblage proceed-

ing neither by resemblance nor by analogy. For I cannot become dog with-

out the dog itself becoming something else. Slepian gets the idea of using

shoes to solve this problem, the artifice of the shoes. If I wear shoes on my

hands, then their elements will enter into a new relation, resulting in the

affect or becoming I seek. But how will I be able to tie the shoe on my sec-

ond hand, once the first is already occupied? With my mouth, which in

turn receives an investment in the assemblage, becoming a dog muzzle,

insofar as a dog muzzle is now used to tie shoes. At each stage of the prob-

lem, what needs to be done is not to compare two organs but to place ele-

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BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ... D 259

ments or materials in a relation that uproots the organ from its specificity,

making it become "with" the other organ. But this becoming, which has

already taken in feet, hands, and mouth, will nevertheless fail. It founders

on the tail. The tail would have had to have been invested, forced to exhibit

elements common to the sexual organ and the caudal appendage, so that

the former would be taken up in the becoming-dog of the man at the same

time as the latter were taken up in a becoming of the dog, in another becom-

ing that would also be part of the assemblage. The plan(e) fails, Slepian fal-

ters on this point. The tail remains an organ of the man on the one hand and

an appendage of the dog on the other; their relations do not enter into com-

position in the new assemblage. This is where psychoanalytic drift sets in,

bringing back all the cliches about the tail, the mother, the childhood mem-

ory of the mother threading needles, all those concrete figures and sym-

bolic analogies.

But this is the way Slepian wants it in this fine text. For

there is a way in which the failure of the plan(e) is part of the plan(e) itself:

The plan(e) is infinite, you can start it in a thousand different ways; you will

always find something that comes too late or too early, forcing you to

recompose all of your relations of speed and slowness, all of your affects,

and to rearrange the overall assemblage. An infinite undertaking. But there

is another way in which the plan(e) fails; this time, it is because another
plan(e) returns full force, breaking the becoming-animal, folding the ani-

mal back onto the animal and the person onto the person, recognizing only

resemblances between elements and analogies between relations. Slepian

confronts both dangers.

We wish to make a simple point about psychoanalysis: from the begin-

ning, it has often encountered the question of the becomings-animal of the

human being: in children, who continually undergo becomings of this

kind; in fetishism and in particular masochism, which continually con-

front this problem. The least that can be said is that the psychoanalysts,

even Jung, did not understand, or did not want to understand. They killed

becoming-animal, in the adult as in the child. They saw nothing. They see

the animal as a representative of drives, or a representation of the parents.

They do not see the reality of a becoming-animal, that it is affect in itself,

the drive in person, and represents nothing. There exist no other drives

than the assemblages themselves. There are two classic texts in which

Freud sees nothing but the father in the becoming-horse of Hans, and

Ferenczi sees the same in the becoming-cock of Arpad. The horse's blind-

ers are the father's eyeglasses, the black around its mouth is his mustache,

its kicks are the parents' "lovemaking." Not one word about Hans's rela-

tion to the street, on how the street was forbidden to him, on what it is for a

child to see the spectacle "a horse is proud, a blinded horse pulls, a horse

falls, a horse is whipped..." Psychoanalysis has no feeling for unnatural

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participations, nor for the assemblages a child can mount in order to solve
a problem from which all exits are barred him: a plan(e), not a phantasy.
Similarly, fewer stupidities would be uttered on the topic of pain, humilia-
tion, and anxiety in masochism if it were understood that it is the
becomings-animal that lead the masochism, not the other way around.
There are always apparatuses, tools, engines involved, there are always
artifices and constraints used in taking Nature to the fullest. That is
because it is necessary to annul the organs, to shut them away so that their
liberated elements can enter into the new relations from which the
becoming-animal, and the circulation of affects within the machinic
assemblage, will result. As we have seen elsewhere, this was the case for the
mask, the bridle, the bit, and the penis sheath in Equus eroticus: paradoxi-
cally, in the becoming-horse assemblage the man subdues his own "instinc-
tive" forces while the animal transmits to him its "acquired" forces.
Reversal, unnatural participation. And the boots of the woman-master
function to annul the leg as a human organ, to make the elements of the leg
enter a relation suited to the overall assemblage: "In this way, it will no
longer be women's legs that have an effect on me . . ,"

But to break the

becoming-animal all that is needed is to extract a segment from it, to
abstract one of its moments, to fail to take into account its internal speeds
and slownesses, to arrest the circulation of affects. Then nothing remains
but imaginary resemblances between terms, or symbolic analogies
between relations. This segment refers to the father, that relation of move-
ment and rest refers to the primal scene, etc. It must be recognized that psy-
choanalysis alone is not enough to bring about this breakage. It only brings
out a danger inherent in becoming. There is always the danger of finding
yourself "playing" the animal, the domestic Oedipal animal, Miller going
bowwow and taking a bone, Fitzgerald licking your hand, Slepian returning
to his mother, or the old man playing horse or dog on an erotic postcard
from 1900 (and "playing" at being a wild animal would be no better).
Becomings-animal continually run these dangers.

Memories of a Haecceity. A body is not defined by the form that deter-

mines it nor as a determinate substance or subject nor by the organs it pos-

sesses or the functions it fulfills. On the plane of consistency, a body is
defined only by a longitude and a latitude: in other words the sum total of

the material elements belonging to it under given relations of movement

and rest, speed and slowness (longitude); the sum total of the intensive

affects it is capable of at a given power or degree of potential (latitude).

Nothing but affects and local movements, differential speeds. The credit

goes to Spinoza for calling attention to these two dimensions of the Body,

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BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ... D 261

and for having defined the plane of Nature as pure longitude and latitude.

Latitude and longitude are the two elements of a cartography.

There is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person,

subject, thing, or substance. We reserve the name haecceity for it.

A sea-

son, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking

nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a

subject. They are haecceities in the sense that they consist entirely of rela-

tions of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to

affect and be affected. When demonology expounds upon the diabolical

art of local movements and transports of affect, it also notes the impor-

tance of rain, hail, wind, pestilential air, or air polluted by noxious parti-

cles, favorable conditions for these transports. Tales must contain

haecceities that are not simply emplacements, but concrete individuations

that have a status of their own and direct the metamorphosis of things and

subjects. Among types of civilizations, the Orient has many more

individuations by haecceity than by subjectivity or substantiality: the

haiku, for example, must include indicators as so many floating lines con-

stituting a complex individual. In Charlotte Bronte, everything is in terms

of wind, things, people, faces, loves, words. Lorca's "five in the evening,"

when love falls and fascism rises. That awful five in the evening! We say,

"What a story!" "What heat!" "What a life!" to designate a very singular

individuation. The hours of the day in Lawrence, in Faulkner. A degree of

heat, an intensity of white, are perfect individualities; and a degree of heat

can combine in latitude with another degree to form a new individual, as in

a body that is cold here and hot there depending on its longitude. Norwe-

gian omelette. A degree of heat can combine with an intensity of white, as

in certain white skies of a hot summer. This is in no way an individuality of

the instant, as opposed to the individuality of permanences or durations. A

tear-off calendar has just as much time as a perpetual calendar, although

the time in question is not the same. There are animals that live no longer

than a day or an hour; conversely, a group of years can be as long as the most

durable subject or object. We can conceive of an abstract time that is equal

for haecceities and for subjects or things. Between the extreme slownesses

and vertiginous speeds of geology and astronomy, Michel Tournier places

meteorology, where meteors live at our pace: "A cloud forms in the sky like

an image in my brain, the wind blows like I breathe, a rainbow spans the

horizon for as long as my heart needs to reconcile itself to life, the summer

passes like vacation drifts by." But is it by chance that in Tournier's novel

this certitude can come only to a twin hero who is deformed and

desubjectified, and has acquired a certain ubiquity?

Even when times are

abstractly equal, the individuation of a life is not the same as the

individuation of the subject that leads it or serves as its support. It is not the

262 □ 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL...

same Plane: in the first case, it is the plane of consistency or of composition

of haecceities, which knows only speeds and affects; and in the second case,

it is the altogether different plane of forms, substances, and subjects. And it

is not in the same time, the same temporality. Aeon: the indefinite time of

the event, the floating line that knows only speeds and continually divides

that which transpires into an already-there that is at the same time

not-yet-here, a simultaneous too-late and too-early, a something that is

both going to happen and has just happened. Chronos: the time of

measure that situates things and persons, develops a form, and determines

a subject.

Boulez distinguishes tempo and nontempo in music: the

"pulsed time" of a formal and functional music based on values versus the

"nonpulsed time" of a floating music, both floating and machinic, which

has nothing but speeds or differences in dynamic.

In short, the

difference is not at all between the ephemeral and the durable, nor even

between the regular and the irregular, but between two modes of

individuation, two modes of temporality.

We must avoid an oversimplified conciliation, as though there were on

the one hand formed subjects, of the thing or person type, and on the other

hand spatiotemporal coordinates of the haecceity type. For you will yield

nothing to haecceities unless you realize that that is what you are, and that

you are nothing but that. When the face becomes a haecceity: "It seemed a

curious mixture that simply made do with time, weather and these peo-

ple."

You are longitude and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses

between unformed particles, a set of nonsubjectified affects. You have the

individuality of a day, a season, a year, a life (regardless of its duration)—a

climate, a wind, a fog, a swarm, a pack (regardless of its regularity). Or at

least you can have it, you can reach it. A cloud of locusts carried in by the

wind at five in the evening; a vampire who goes out at night, a werewolf at

full moon. It should not be thought that a haecceity consists simply of a

decor or backdrop that situates subjects, or of appendages that hold things

and people to the ground. It is the entire assemblage in its individuated

aggregate that is a haecceity; it is this assemblage that is defined by a longi-

tude and a latitude, by speeds and affects, independently of forms and sub-

jects, which belong to another plane. It is the wolf itself, and the horse, and

the child, that cease to be subjects to become events, in assemblages that

are inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life. The

street enters into composition with the horse, just as the dying rat enters

into composition with the air, and the beast and the full moon enter into

composition with each other. At most, we may distinguish assemblage

haecceities (a body considered only as longitude and latitude) and

interassemblage haecceities, which also mark the potentialities of becom-

ing within each assemblage (the milieu of intersection of the longitudes

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BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL.. . □ 263

and latitudes). But the two are strictly inseparable. Climate, wind, season,

hour are not of another nature than the things, animals, or people that pop-

ulate them, follow them, sleep and awaken within them. This should be

read without a pause: the animal-stalks-at-five-o'clock. The

becoming-evening, becoming-night of an animal, blood nuptials. Five

o'clock is this animal! This animal is this place! "The thin dog is running

in the road, this dog is the road," cries Virginia Woolf. That is how we

need to feel. Spatiotemporal relations, determinations, are not predicates

of the thing but dimensions of multiplicities. The street is as much a part

of the omnibus-horse assemblage as the Hans assemblage the

becoming-horse of which it initiates. We are all five o'clock in the evening,

or another hour, or rather two hours simultaneously, the optimal and the

pessimal, noon-midnight, but distributed in a variable fashion. The plane

of consistency contains only haecceities, along intersecting lines. Forms

and subjects are not of that world. Virginia Woolf s walk through the

crowd, among the taxis. Taking a walk is a haecceity; never again will

Mrs. Dalloway say to herself, "I am this, I am that, he is this, he is that." And

"She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a

knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on.... She

always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one

day."

Haecceity, fog, glare. A haecceity has neither beginning nor end,

origin nor destination; it is always in the middle. It is not made of points,

only of lines. It is a rhizome.

And it is not the same language, at least not the same usage of language.

For if the plane of consistency only has haecceities for content, it also has

its own particular semiotic to serve as expression. A plane of content and a

plane of expression. This semiotic is composed above all of proper names,

verbs in the infinitive and indefinite articles or pronouns. Indefinite article
+ proper name + infinitive verb constitutes the basic chain of expression,

correlative to the least formalized contents, from the standpoint of a

semiotic that has freed itself from both formal signifiances and personal

subjectifications. In the first place, the verb in the infinitive is in no way

indeterminate with respect to time; it expresses the floating, nonpulsed

time proper to Aeon, in other words, the time of the pure event or of becom-

ing, which articulates relative speeds and slownesses independently of the

chronometric or chronological values that time assumes in the other

modes. There is good reason to oppose the infinitive as mode and tense of

becoming to all of the other modes and tenses, which pertain to Chronos

since they form pulsations or values of being (the verb "to be" is precisely

the only one that has no infinitive, or rather the infinitive of which is only

an indeterminate, empty expression, taken abstractly to designate the sum

total of definite modes and tenses).

Second, the proper name is no way

264 □ 1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ...

the indicator of a subject; thus it seems useless to ask whether its operation

resembles the nomination of a species, according to whether the subject is

considered to be of another nature than that of the Form under which it is

classified, or only the ultimate act of that Form, the limit of classifica-

tion.

The proper name does not indicate a subject; nor does a noun take

on the value of a proper name as a function of a form or a species. The

proper name fundamentally designates something that is of the order of

the event, of becoming or of the haecceity. It is the military men and meteo-

rologists who hold the secret of proper names, when they give them to a

strategic operation or a hurricane. The proper name is not the subject of a

tense but the agent of an infinitive. It marks a longitude and a latitude. If

Tick, Wolf, Horse, etc., are true proper names, they are so not by virtue of

the specific and generic denominators that characterize them but of the

speeds that compose them and the affects that fill them; it is by virtue of the

event they are in themselves and in the assemblages—the becoming-horse

of Little Hans, the becoming-wolf of the Were [which etymologically

means "man"—Trans.], the becoming-tick of the Stoic (other proper

names).

Third, the indefinite article and the indefinite pronoun are no more

indeterminate than the infinitive. Or rather they are lacking a determina-

tion only insofar as they are applied to a form that is itself indeterminate,

or to a determinable subject. On the other hand, they lack nothing when

they introduce haecceities, events, the individuation of which does not

pass into a form and is not effected by a subject. The indefinite then has

maximum determination: once upon a time; a child is being beaten; a horse

is falling ... Here, the elements in play find their individuation in the

assemblage of which they are a part, independent of the form of their con-

cept and the subjectivity of their person. We have remarked several times

the extent to which children use the indefinite not as something indetermi-

nate but, on the contrary, as an individuating function within a collectivity.

That is why we are dumbfounded by the efforts of psychoanalysis, which

desperately wants there to be something definite hidden behind the indefi-

nite, a possessive, a person. When the child says "a belly," "a horse," "how

do people grow up?" "someone is beating a child," the psychoanalyst hears

"my belly," "the father," "will I grow up to be like daddy?" The psychoana-

lyst asks: Who is being beaten, and by whom?

Even linguistics is not

immune from the same prejudice, inasmuch as it is inseparable from a

personology; according to linguistics, in addition to the indefinite -article

and the pronoun, the third-person pronoun also lacks the determination of

subjectivity that is proper to the first two persons and is supposedly the

necessary condition for all enunciation.

We believe on the contrary that the third person indefinite,

THEY

1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ... D 265

implies no indetermination from this point of view; it ties the statement to

a collective assemblage, as its necessary condition, rather than to a subject

of the enunciation. Blanchot is correct in saying that

ONE

and

—one is

dying, he is unhappy—in no way take the place of a subject, but instead do

away with any subject in favor of an assemblage of the haecceity type that

carries or brings out the event insofar as it is unformed and incapable of

being effectuated by persons ("something happens to them that they can

only get a grip on again by letting go of their ability to say I").

The HE does

not represent a subject but rather makes a diagram of an assemblage. It

does not overcode statements, it does not transcend them as do the first

two persons; on the contrary, it prevents them from falling under the tyr-

anny of subjective or signifying constellations, under the regime of empty

redundancies. The contents of the chains of expression it articulates are

those that can be assembled for a maximum number of occurrences and

becomings. "They arrive like fate... where do they come from, how have

they pushed this far .. .?"

He or one, indefinite article, proper name,

infinitive verb:

HANS

TO BECOME HORSE

A PACK NAMED WOLF TO LOOK AT

HE, ONE TO DIE, WASP TO MEET ORCHID, THEY ARRIVE HUNS. Classified ads,

telegraphic machines on the plane of consistency (once again, we are

reminded of the procedures of Chinese poetry and the rules for translation

suggested by the best commentators).

Memories of a Plan(e) Maker. Perhaps there are two planes, or two ways

of conceptualizing the plane. The plane can be a hidden principle, which

makes visible what is seen and audible what is heard, etc., which at every

instant causes the given to be given, in this or that state, at this or that

moment. But the plane itself is not given. It is by nature hidden. It can only

be inferred, induced, concluded from that to which it gives rise (simultane-

ously or successively, synchronically or diachronically). A plane of this

kind is as much a plan(e) of organization as of development: it is structural

or genetic, and both at once, structure and genesis, the structural plan(e) of

formed organizations with their developments, the genetic plan(e) of evo-

lutionary developments with their organizations. These are only nuances

of this first conception of the plane. To accord these nuances too much

importance would prevent us from grasping something more important;

that the plan(e), conceived or made in this fashion, always concerns the

development of forms and the formation of subjects. A hidden structure

necessary for forms, a secret signifier necessary for subjects. It ensues that

the plan(e) itself will not be given. It exists only in a supplementary dimen-

sion to that to which it gives rise (n +1). This makes it a teleological plan(e),

a design, a mental principle. It is a plan(e) of transcendence. It is a plan(e)

of analogy, either because it assigns the eminent term of a development or

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because it establishes the proportional relations of a structure. It may be in

the mind of a god, or in the unconscious of life, of the soul, or of language: it

is always concluded from its own effects. It is always inferred. Even if it is
said to be immanent, it is so only by absence, analogically (metaphorically,

metonymically, etc.). The tree is given in the seed, but as a function of a

plan(e) that is not given. The same applies to music. The developmental or

organizational principle does not appear in itself, in a direct relation with

that which develops or is organized: There is a transcendent compositional

principle that is not of the nature of sound, that is not "audible" by itself or

for itself. This opens the way for all possible interpretations. Forms and

their developments, and subjects and their formations, relate to a plan(e)

that operates as a transcendent unity or hidden principle. The plan(e) can

always be described, but as a part aside, as ungiven in that to which it gives

rise. Is this not how even Balzac, even Proust, describe their work's plan(e)

of organization or development, as though in a metalanguage? Is not

Stockhausen also obliged to describe the structure of his sound forms as

existing "alongside" them, since he is unable to make it audible? Life

plan(e), music plan(e), writing plan(e), it's all the same: a plan(e) that can-

not be given as such, that can only be inferred from the forms it develops

and the subjects it forms, since it is for these forms and these subjects.

Then there is an altogether different plane, or an altogether different

conception of the plane. Here, there are no longer any forms or develop-

ments of forms; nor are there subjects or the formation of subjects. There is

no structure, any more than there is genesis. There are only relations of

movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, or at

least between elements that are relatively unformed, molecules and

particles of all kinds. There are only haecceities, affects, subjectless indi-

viduations that constitute collective assemblages. Nothing develops, but

things arrive late or early, and form this or that assemblage depending on

their compositions of speed. Nothing subjectifies, but haecceities form

according to compositions of nonsubjectified powers or affects. We call

this plane, which knows only longitudes and latitudes, speeds and haec-

ceities, the plane of consistency or composition (as opposed to the plan(e)

of organization or development). It is necessarily a plane of immanence

and univocality. We therefore call it the plane of Nature, although nature

has nothing to do with it, since on this plane there is no distinction between

the natural and the artificial. However many dimensions it may have, it

never has a supplementary dimension to that which transpires upon it.

That alone makes it natural and immanent. The same goes for the principle

of contradiction: this plane could also be called the plane of

noncontradiction. The plane of consistency could be called the plane of

nonconsistency. It is a geometrical plane, no longer tied to a mental design

1730:

BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ... D 267

but to an abstract design. Its number of dimensions continually increases

as what happens happens, but even so it loses nothing of its planitude. It is

thus a plane of proliferation, peopling, contagion; but this proliferation of

material has nothing to do with an evolution, the development of a form or

the filiation of forms. Still less is it a regression leading back to a principle.

It is on the contrary an involution, in which form is constantly being dis-

solved, freeing times and speeds. It is a fixed plane, a fixed sound plane, or

visual plane, or writing plane, etc. Here, fixed does not mean immobile: it

is the absolute state of movement as well as of rest, from which all relative

speeds and slownesses spring, and nothing but them. Certain modern

musicians oppose the transcendent plan(e) of organization, which is said

to have dominated all of Western classical music, to the immanent sound

plane, which is always given along with that to which it gives rise, brings the

imperceptible to perception, and carries only differential speeds and

slownesses in a kind of molecular lapping: the work of art must mark sec-
onds, tenths and hundredths of seconds.

Or rather it is a question of a free-

ing of time, Aeon, a nonpulsed time for a floating music, as Boulez says, an

electronic music in which forms are replaced by pure modifications of

speed. It is undoubtedly John Cage who first and most perfectly deployed

this fixed sound plane, which affirms a process against all structure and

genesis, a floating time against pulsed time or tempo, experimentation

against any kind of interpretation, and in which silence as sonorous rest

also marks the absolute state of movement. The same could be said of the

fixed visual plane: Godard, for example, effectively carries the fixed

plane of cinema to this state where forms dissolve, and all that subsists are

tiny variations of speed between movements in composition. Nathalie

Sarraute, for her part, proposes a clear distinction between two planes of

writing: a transcendent plan(e) that organizes and develops forms (genres,

themes, motifs) and assigns and develops subjects (personages, characters,

feelings); and an altogether different plane that liberates the particles of an

anonymous matter, allowing them to communicate through the "enve-

lope" of forms and subjects, retaining between them only relations of

movement and rest, speed and slowness, floating affects, so that the plane

itself is perceived at the same time as it allows us to perceive the impercep-

tible (the microplane, the molecular plane).

So from the point of view of a

well-founded abstraction, we can make it seem as though the two planes,

the two conceptions of the plane, were in clear and absolute opposition.

From this point of view, we can say, You can see the difference between the

following two types of propositions: (1) forms develop and subjects form as

a function of a plan(e) that can only be inferred (the planfe] of organi-

zation-development); (2) there are only speeds and slownesses between

unformed elements, and affects between nonsubjectified powers, as a func-

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1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL...

tion of a plane that is necessarily given at the same time as that to which it

gives rise (the plane of consistency or composition).

Let us consider three major cases from nineteenth-century German lit-

erature, Holderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche. First, Holderlin's extraordinary

composition, Hyperion, as analyzed by Robert Rovini: the importance of

haecceities of the season type. These constitute, in two different ways, the

"frame of the narrative" (plan[e]) and the details of what happens within

that frame (the assemblages and interassemblages).

He also notes how the

succession of the seasons and the superposition of the same season from

different years dissolves forms and persons and gives rise to movements,

speeds, delays, and affects, as if as the narrative progressed something were

escaping from an impalpable matter. And perhaps also the relation to a

"realpolitik," to a war machine, to a musical machine of dissonance.

Kleist: everything with him, in his writing as in his life, becomes speed

and slowness. A succession of catatonic freezes and extreme velocities,

fainting spells and shooting arrows. Sleep on your steed, then take off at a

gallop. Jump from one assemblage to another, with the aid of a faint, by

crossing a void. Kleist multiplies "life plan(e)s," but his voids and failures,

his leaps, earthquakes, and plagues are always included on a single plane.

The plane is not a principle of organization but a means of transportation.

No form develops, no subject forms; affects are displaced, becomings cata-

pult forward and combine into blocks, like the becoming-woman of Achil-

les and the becoming-dog of Penthesilea. Kleist offers a wonderful

explanation of how forms and persons are only appearances produced by

the displacement of a center of gravity on an abstract line, and by the con-

junction of these lines on a plane of immanence. He is fascinated by bears;

they are impossible to fool because their cruel little eyes see through

appearances to the true "soul of movement," the Gemut or nonsubjective

affect: the becoming-bear of Kleist. Even death can only be conceptualized

as the intersection of elementary reactions of different speeds. A skull
exploding, one of Kleist's obsessions. All of Kleist's work is traversed by a

war machine invoked against the State, by a musical machine invoked

against painting or the "picture." It is odd how Goethe and Hegel hated this

new kind of writing. Because for them the plan(e) must indissolubly be a

harmonious development of Form and a regulated formation of the Sub-

ject, personage, or character (the sentimental education, the interior and

substantial solidity of the character, the harmony or analogy of the forms

and continuity of development, the cult of the State, etc.). Their concep-

tion of the Plane is totally opposed to that of Kleist. The anti-Goetheism,

anti-Hegelianism of Kleist, and already of Holderlin. Goethe gets to the

crux of the matter when he reproaches Kleist for simultaneously setting up

a pure "stationary process" that is like the fixed plane, introducing voids

1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ... □ 269

and jumps that prevent any development of a central character, and mobi-

lizing a violence of affects that causes an extreme confusion of feelings.

Nietzsche does the same thing by different means. There is no longer

any development of forms or formation of subjects. He criticizes Wagner

for retaining too much harmonic form, and too many pedagogical person-

ages, or "characters": too much Hegel and Goethe. Now Bizet, on the other

hand, Nietzsche says ... It seems to us that fragmentary writing is not so

much the issue in Nietzsche. It is instead speeds and slownesses: not writ-

ing slowly or rapidly, but rather writing, and everything else besides, as a

production of speeds and slownesses between particles. No form will resist

that, no character or subject will survive it. Zarathustra is only speeds and

slownesses, and the eternal return, the life of the eternal return, is the first

great concrete freeing of nonpulsed time. Ecce Homo has only individ-

uations by haecceities. It is inevitable that the Plan(e), thus conceived, will

always fail, but that the failures will be an integral part of the plan(e): See

the multitude of plans for The Will to Power. For a given aphorism, it is

always possible, even necessary, to introduce new relations of speed and

slowness between its elements that truly make it change assemblages, jump

from one assemblage to the next (the issue is therefore not the fragment).

As Cage says, it is of the nature of the plan(e) that it fail.

Precisely because

it is not a plan(e) of organization, development, or formation, but of

nonvoluntary transmutation. Or Boulez: "Program the machine so that

each time a tape is played on it, it produces different time characteristics."

So the plan(e)—life plan(e), writing plan(e), music plan(e)—must neces-

sarily fail for it is impossible to be faithful to it; but the failures are a part of

the plan(e) for the plan(e) expands or shrinks along with the dimensions of

that which it deploys in each instance (planitude of n dimensions). A

strange machine that is simultaneously a machine of war, music, and

contagion-proliferation-involution.

Why does the opposition between the two kinds of planes lead to a still

more abstract hypothesis? Because one continually passes from one to the

other, by unnoticeable degrees and without being aware of it, or one be-

comes aware of it only afterward. Because one continually reconstitutes

one plane atop another, or extricates one from the other. For example, all

we need to do is to sink the floating plane of immanence, bury it in the

depths of Nature instead of allowing it to play freely on the surface, for it to

pass to the other side and assume the role of a ground that can no longer be

anything more than a principle of analogy from the standpoint of organiza-

tion, and a law of continuity from the standpoint of development.

The

plane of organization or development effectively covers what we have

called stratification: Forms and subjects, organs and functions, are

"strata" or relations between strata. The plane of consistency or imma-

270 D

1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL.. .

nence, on the other hand, implies a destratification of all of Nature, by

even the most artificial of means. The plane of consistency is the body

without organs. Pure relations of speed and slowness between particles

imply movements of deterritorialization, just as pure affects imply an

enterprise of desubjectification. Moreover, the plane of consistency does

not preexist the movements of deterritorialization that unravel it, the lines

of flight that draw it and cause it to rise to the surface, the becomings that

compose it. The plane of organization is constantly working away at the

plane of consistency, always trying to plug the lines of flight, stop or inter-

rupt the movements of deterritorialization, weigh them down, restratify

them, reconstitute forms and subjects in a dimension of depth. Conversely,

the plane of consistency is constantly extricating itself from the plane of

organization, causing particles to spin off the strata, scrambling forms by

dint of speed or slowness, breaking down functions by means of assem-

blages or microassemblages. But once again, so much caution is needed to

prevent the plane of consistency from becoming a pure plane of abolition

or death, to prevent the involution from turning into a regression to the

undifferentiated. Is it not necessary to retain a minimum of strata, a mini-

mum of forms and functions, a minimal subject from which to extract

materials, affects, and assemblages?

In fact, the opposition we should set up between the two planes is that

between two abstract poles: for example, to the transcendent, organiza-

tional plane of Western music based on sound forms and their develop-

ment, we oppose the immanent plane of consistency of Eastern music,

composed of speeds and slownesses, movements and rest. In keeping with

our concrete hypothesis, the whole becoming of Western music, all musical

becoming, implies a minimum of sound forms and even of melodic and

harmonic functions; speeds and slownesses are made to pass across them,

and it is precisely these speeds and slownesses that reduce the forms and

functions to the minimum. Beethoven produced the most astonishing

polyphonic richness with relatively scanty themes of three or four notes.

There is a material proliferation that goes hand in hand with a dissolution

of form (involution) but is at the same time accompanied by a continuous

development of form. Perhaps Schumann's genius is the most striking case

of form being developed only for the relations of speed and slowness one

materially and emotionally assigns it. Music has always submitted its

forms and motifs to temporal transformations, augmentations or diminu-

tions, slowdowns or accelerations, which do not occur solely according to

laws of organization or even of development. Expanding and contracting

microintervals are at play within coded intervals. Wagner and the

post-Wagnerians free variations of speed between sound particles to an

even greater extent. Ravel and Debussy retain just enough form to shatter

it,

1730:

BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... □ 271

affect it, modify it through speeds and slownesses. Bolero is the classic

example, nearly a caricature, of a machinic assemblage that preserves a

minimum of form in order to take it to the bursting point. Boulez speaks of

proliferations of little motifs, accumulations of little notes that proceed

kinematically and affectively, sweeping away a simple form by adding indi-

cations of speed to it; this allows one to produce extremely complex

dynamic relations on the basis of intrinsically simple formal relations.

Even a rubato by Chopin cannot be reproduced because it will have differ-

ent time characteristics at each playing.

It is as though an immense plane

of consistency of variable speed were forever sweeping up forms and func-

tions, forms and subjects, extracting from them particles and affects. A

clock keeping a whole assortment of times.

What is a girl, what is a group of girls? Proust at least has shown us once

and for all that their individuation, collective or singular, proceeds not by

subjectivity but by haecceity, pure haecceity. "Fugitive beings." They are

pure relations of speeds and slownesses, and nothing else. A girl is late on

account of her speed: she did too many things, crossed too many spaces in

relation to the relative time of the person waiting for her. Thus her apparent

slowness is transformed into the breakneck speed of our waiting. It must be

said in this connection, and for the whole of the Recherche du temps perdu,

that Swann does not at all occupy the same position as the narrator. Swann

is not a rough sketch or precursor of the narrator, except secondarily and at

rare moments. They are not at all on the same plane. Swann is always think-

ing and feeling in terms of subjects, forms, resemblances between subjects,

and correspondences between forms. For him, one of Odette's lies is a form

whose secret subjective content must be discovered, provoking amateur

detective activity. To him Vinteuil's music is a form that must evoke some-

thing else, fall back on something else, echo other forms, whether paint-

ings, faces, or landscapes. Although the narrator may follow in Swann's

footsteps, he is nonetheless in a different element, on a different plane. One

of Albertine's lies is nearly devoid of content; it tends on the contrary to

merge with the emission of a particle issuing from the eyes of the beloved, a

particle that stands only for itself and travels too fast through the narrator's

auditory or visual field. This molecular speed is unbearable because it

indicates a distance, a proximity where Albertine would like to be, and

already is.

So that the narrator's pose is not principally that of the investi-

gating detective but (a very different figure) that of the jailer. How can he

become master of speed, how can he stand it nervously (as a headache) and

perceptually (as a flash)? How can he build a prison for Albertine? Jealousy

is different in Swann and the narrator, as is the perception of music:

Vinteuil gradually ceases to be apprehended in terms of forms and compa-

rable subjects, and assumes incredible speeds and slownesses that combine

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on a plane of consistency of variation, the plane of music and of the
Recherche (just as Wagnerian motifs abandon all fixity of form and all

assignation of personages). It is as though Swann's desperate efforts to

reterritorialize the flow of things (to reterritorialize Odette on a secret,

painting on a face, music on the Bois de Boulogne) were replaced by the

sped-up movement of deterritorialization, by a linear speedup of the

abstract machine, sweeping away faces and landscapes, and then love, jeal-

ousy, painting, and music itself, according to increasingly stronger coeffi-

cients that nourish the Work at risk of dissolving everything and dying. For

the narrator, despite partial victories, fails in his project; that project was

not at all to regain time or to force back memories, but to become master of

speeds to the rhythm of his asthma. It was to face annihilation. But another

outcome was possible, or was made possible by Proust.

Memories of a Molecule. Becoming-animal is only one becoming among

others. A kind of order or apparent progression can be established for the

segments of becoming in which we find ourselves; becoming-woman,

becoming-child; becoming-animal, -vegetable, or -mineral;

becomings-molecular of all kinds, becomings-particles. Fibers lead us

from one to the other, transform one into the other as they pass through

doors and across thresholds. Singing or composing, painting, writing have

no other aim: to unleash these becomings. Especially music; music is

traversed by a becoming-woman, becoming-child, and not only at the level

of themes and motifs: the little refrain, children's games and dances,

childhood scenes. Instrumentation and orchestration are permeated by

becomings-animal, above all becomings-bird, but many others besides. The

lapping, wailing of molecular discordances have always been present,

even if instrumental evolution with other factors is now giving them

growing importance, as the value of a new threshold for a properly

musical content: the sound molecule, relations of speed and slowness

between particles. Becomings-animal plunge into becomings-molecular.

This raises all kinds of questions.

In a way, we must start at the end: all becomings are already molecular.

That is because becoming is not to imitate or identify with something or

someone. Nor is it to proportion formal relations. Neither of these two fig-

ures of analogy is applicable to becoming: neither the imitation of a subject

nor the proportionality of a form. Starting from the forms one has, the sub-

ject one is, the organs one has, or the functions one fulfills, becoming is to

extract particles between which one establishes the relations of movement

and rest, speed and slowness that are closest to what one is becoming, and

through which one becomes. This is the sense in which becoming is the

process of desire. This principle of proximity or approximation is entirely

particular and reintroduces no analogy whatsoever. It indicates as rigor-

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BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 273

ously as possible a zone ofproximity

or copresence of a particle, the move-

ment into which any particle that enters the zone is drawn. Louis Wolfson

embarks upon a strange undertaking: a schizophrenic, he translates as

quickly as possible each phrase in his maternal language into foreign words

with similar sound and meaning; an anorexic, he rushes to the refrigerator,

tears open the packages and snatches their contents, stuffing himself as

quickly as possible.

It would be false to believe that he needs to borrow

"disguised" words from foreign languages. Rather, he snatches from his

own language verbal particles that can no longer belong to the form of that

language, just as he snatches from food alimentary particles that no longer

act as formed nutritional substances; the two kinds of particles enter into

proximity. We could also put it this way: Becoming is to emit particles that

take on certain relations of movement and rest because they enter a partic-

ular zone of proximity. Or, it is to emit particles that enter that zone

because they take on those relations. A haecceity is inseparable from the

fog and mist that depend on a molecular zone, a corpuscular space. Prox-

imity is a notion, at once topological and quantal, that marks a belonging to

the same molecule, independently of the subjects considered and the forms

determined.

Scherer and Hocquenghem made this essential point in their reconsid-

eration of the problem of wolf-children. Of course, it is not a question of a

real production, as if the child "really" became an animal; nor is it a ques-

tion of a resemblance, as if the child imitated animals that really raised it;

nor is it a question of a symbolic metaphor, as if the autistic child that was

abandoned or lost merely became the "analogue" of an animal. Scherer

and Hocquenghem are right to expose this false reasoning, which is based

on a culturalism or moralism upholding the irreducibility of the human

order: Because the child has not been transformed into an animal, it must

only have a metaphorical relation to it, induced by the child's illness or

rejection. For their own part, they appeal to an objective zone of

indetermi-nation or uncertainty, "something shared or indiscernible," a

proximity "that makes it impossible to say where the boundary between

the human and animal lies," not only in the case of autistic children, but

for all children; it is as though, independent of the evolution carrying

them toward adulthood, there were room in the child for other

becomings, "other contemporaneous possibilities" that are not

regressions but creative involutions bearing witness to "an inhumanity
immediately experienced in the body as such," unnatural nuptials

"outside the programmed body." There is a reality of becoming-animal,

even though one does not in reality become animal. It is useless, then, to

raise the objection that the dog-child only plays dog within the limits of

his formal constitution, and does nothing canine that another human

being could not have done if he or she had so

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desired. For what needs to be explained is precisely the fact that all chil-

dren, and even many adults, do it to a greater or lesser degree, and in so

doing bear witness to an inhuman connivance with the animal, rather than

an Oedipal symbolic community.

Neither should it be thought that chil-

dren who graze, or eat dirt or raw flesh, are merely getting the vitamins and

minerals they need. It is a question of composing a body with the animal, a

body without organs defined by zones of intensity or proximity. Where

does this objective indetermination or indiscernibility of which Scherer

and Hocquenghem speak come from?

An example: Do not imitate a dog, but make your organism enter into

composition with something else in such a way that the particles emitted

from the aggregate thus composed will be canine as a function of the rela-

tion of movement and rest, or of molecular proximity, into which they

enter. Clearly, this something else can be quite varied, and be more or less

directly related to the animal in question: it can be the animal's natural

food (dirt and worm), or its exterior relations with other animals (you can

become-dog with cats, or become-monkey with a horse), or an apparatus or

prosthesis to which a person subjects the animal (muzzle and reindeer,

etc.), or something that does not even have a localizable relation to the ani-

mal in question. For this last case, we have seen how Slepian bases his

attempt to become-dog on the idea of tying shoes to his hands using his

mouth-muzzle. Philippe Gavi cites the performances of Lolito, an eater of

bottles, earthenware, porcelains, iron, and even bicycles, who declares: "I

consider myself half-animal, half-man. More animal than man. I love ani-

mals, dogs especially, I feel a bond with them. My teeth have adapted; in

fact, when I don't eat glass or iron, my jaw aches like a young dog's that

craves to chew a bone."

If we interpret the word "like" as a metaphor, or

propose a structural analogy of relations (man-iron = dog-bone), we under-

stand nothing of becoming. The word "like" is one of those words that

change drastically in meaning and function when they are used in connec-

tion with haecceities, when they are made into expressions of becomings

instead of signified states or signifying relations. A dog may exercise its jaw

on iron, but when it does it is using its jaw as a molar organ. When Lolito

eats iron, it is totally different: he makes his jaw enter into composition

with the iron in such a way that he himself becomes the jaw of a molecular

dog. The actor Robert De Niro walks "like" a crab in a certain film

sequence; but, he says, it is not a question of his imitating a crab; it is a ques-

tion of making something that has to do with the crab enter into composi-

tion with the image, with the speed of the image.

That is the essential

point for us: you become-animal only if, by whatever means or elements,

you emit corpuscles that enter the relation of movement and rest of the ani-

mal particles, or what amounts to the same thing, that enter the zone of

1730:

BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ... D 275

proximity of the animal molecule. You become animal only molecularly.

You do not become a barking molar dog, but by barking, if it is done with

enough feeling, with enough necessity and composition, you emit a molec-

ular dog. Man does not become wolf, or vampire, as if he changed molar

species; the vampire and werewolf are becomings of man, in other words,

proximities between molecules in composition, relations of movement

and rest, speed and slowness between emitted particles. Of course there are

werewolves and vampires, we say this with all our heart; but do not look for

a resemblance or analogy to the animal, for this is becoming-animal in

action, the production of the molecular animal (whereas the "real" animal

is trapped in its molar form and subjectivity). It is within us that the animal

bares its teeth like Hofmannsthal's rat, or the flower opens its petals; but

this is done by corpuscular emission, by molecular proximity, and not by

the imitation of a subject or a proportionality of form. Albertine can always

imitate a flower, but it is when she is sleeping and enters into composition

with the particles of sleep that her beauty spot and the texture of her skin

enter a relation of rest and movement that place her in the zone of a molec-

ular vegetable: the becoming-plant of Albertine. And it is when she is held

prisoner that she emits the particles of a bird. And it is when she flees,

launches down a line of flight, that she becomes-horse, even if it is the horse

of death.

Yes, all becomings are molecular: the animal, flower, or stone one

becomes are molecular collectivities, haecceities, not molar subjects,

objects, or form that we know from the outside and recognize from experi-

ence, through science, or by habit. If this is true, then we must say the same

of things human: there is a becoming-woman, a becoming-child, that do

not resemble the woman or the child as clearly distinct molar entities (al-

though it is possible—only possible—for the woman or child to occupy

privileged positions in relation to these becomings). What we term a molar

entity is, for example, the woman as defined by her form, endowed with

organs and functions and assigned as a subject. Becoming-woman is not

imitating this entity or even transforming oneself into it. We are not, how-

ever, overlooking the importance of imitation, or moments of imitation,

among certain homosexual males, much less the prodigious attempt at a

real transformation on the part of certain transvestites. All we are saying is

that these indissociable aspects of becoming-woman must first be under-

stood as a function of something else: not imitating or assuming the female

form, but emitting particles that enter the relation of movement and rest,

or the zone of proximity, of a microfemininity, in other words, that produce

in us a molecular woman, create the molecular woman. We do not mean to

say that a creation of this kind is the prerogative of the man, but on the con-

trary that the woman as a molar entity has to become-woman in order that

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the man also becomes- or can become-woman. It is, of course, indispensa-

ble for women to conduct a molar politics, with a view to winning back

their own organism, their own history, their own subjectivity: "we as

women .. ." makes its appearance as a subject of enunciation. But it is dan-

gerous to confine oneself to such a subject, which does not function with-

out drying up a spring or stopping a flow. The song of life is often intoned

by the driest of women, moved by ressentiment, the will to power and cold

mothering. Just as a dessicated child makes a much better child, there

being no childhood flow emanating from it any longer. It is no more ade-

quate to say that each sex contains the other and must develop the opposite

pole in itself. Bisexuality is no better a concept than the separateness of the

sexes. It is as deplorable to miniaturize, internalize the binary machine as

it is to exacerbate it; it does not extricate us from it. It is thus necessary to

conceive of a molecular women's politics that slips into molar confronta-

tions, and passes under or through them.

When Virginia Woolf was questioned about a specifically women's writ-

ing, she was appalled at the idea of writing "as a woman." Rather, writing

should produce a becoming-woman as atoms of womanhood capable of

crossing and impregnating an entire social field, and of contaminating

men, of sweeping them up in that becoming. Very soft particles—but also

very hard and obstinate, irreducible, indomitable. The rise of women in

English novel writing has spared no man: even those who pass for the most

virile, the most phallocratic, such as Lawrence and Miller, in their turn

continually tap into and emit particles that enter the proximity or zone of

indiscernibility of women. In writing, they become-women. The question

is not, or not only, that of the organism, history, and subject of enunciation

that oppose masculine to feminine in the great dualism machines. The

question is fundamentally that of the body—the body they steal from us in

order to fabricate opposable organisms. This body is stolen first from the

girl: Stop behaving like that, you're not a little girl anymore, you're not a

tomboy, etc. The girl's becoming is stolen first, in order to impose a history,

or prehistory, upon her. The boy's turn comes next, but it is by using the girl

as an example, by pointing to the girl as the object of his desire, that an

opposed organism, a dominant history is fabricated for him too. The girl is

the first victim, but she must also serve as an example and a trap. That is

why, conversely, the reconstruction of the body as a Body without Organs,

the anorganism of the body, is inseparable from a becoming-woman, or the

production of a molecular woman. Doubtless, the girl becomes a woman in

the molar or organic sense. But conversely, becoming-woman or the molec-

ular woman is the girl herself. The girl is certainly not defined by virginity;

she is defined by a relation of movement and rest, speed and slowness, by a

combination of atoms, an emission of particles: haecceity. She never ceases

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BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 277

to roam upon a body without organs. She is an abstract line, or a line of

flight. Thus girls do not belong to an age group, sex, order, or kingdom: they

slip in everywhere, between orders, acts, ages, sexes; they produce n molec-

ular sexes on the line of flight in relation to the dualism machines they cross

right through. The only way to get outside the dualisms is to be-between, to

pass between, the intermezzo—that is what Virginia Woolf lived with all

her energies, in all of her work, never ceasing to become. The girl is like the

block of becoming that remains contemporaneous to each opposable term,

man, woman, child, adult. It is not the girl who becomes a woman; it is

becoming-woman that produces the universal girl. Trost, a mysterious

author, painted a portrait of the girl, to whom he linked the fate of the revo-

lution: her speed, her freely machinic body, her intensities, her abstract

line or line of flight, her molecular production, her indifference to mem-

ory, her nonfigurative character—"the nonfigurative of desire."

Joan of

Arc? The special role of the girl in Russian terrorism: the girl with the

bomb, guardian of dynamite? It is certain that molecular politics proceeds

via the girl and the child. But it is also certain that girls and children draw

their strength neither from the molar status that subdues them nor from

the organism and subjectivity they receive; they draw their strength from

the becoming-molecular they cause to pass between sexes and ages, the

becoming-child of the adult as well as of the child, the becoming-woman of

the man as well as of the woman. The girl and the child do not become; it is

becoming itself that is a child or a girl. The child does not become an adult

any more than the girl becomes a woman; the girl is the becoming-woman

of each sex, just as the child is the becoming-young of every age. Knowing

how to age does not mean remaining young; it means extracting from one's

age the particles, the speeds and slownesses, the flows that constitute the

youth of that age. Knowing how to love does not mean remaining a man or a

woman; it means extracting from one's sex the particles, the speeds and

slownesses, the flows, the n sexes that constitute the girl of that sexuality. It

is Age itself that is a becoming-child, just as Sexuality, any sexuality, is a

becoming-woman, in other words, a girl. This by way of response to the stu-

pid question, Why did Proust make Albert Albertine?

Although all becomings are already molecular, including

becoming-woman, it must be said that all becomings begin with and pass

through becoming-woman. It is the key to all the other becomings. When

the man of war disguises himself as a woman, flees disguised as a girl, hides

as a girl, it is not a shameful, transitory incident in his life. To hide, to

camouflage oneself, is a warrior function, and the line of flight attracts the

enemy, traverses something and puts what it traverses to flight; the

warrior arises in the infinity of a line of flight. Although the femininity of

the man of war is not accidental, it should not be thought of as structural,

or regulated by a

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correspondence of relations. It is difficult to see how the correspondence

between the two relations "man-war" and "woman-marriage" could entail

an equivalence between the warrior and the girl as a woman who refuses to

marry.

It is just as difficult to see how the general bisexuality, or even

homosexuality, of military societies could explain this phenomenon,

which is no more imitative than it is structural, representing instead an

essential anomie of the man of war. This phenomenon can only be under-

stood in terms of becoming. We have seen how the man of war, by virtue of
his furor and celerity, was swept up in irresistible becomings-animal. These

are becomings that have as their necessary condition the becoming-woman

of the warrior, or his alliance with the girl, his contagion with her. The man

of war is inseparable from the Amazons. The union of the girl and the man

of war does not produce animals, but simultaneously produces the

becoming-woman of the latter and the becoming-animal of the former, in a

single "block" in which the warrior in turn becomes animal by contagion

with the girl at the same time as the girl becomes warrior by contagion with

the animal. Everything ties together in an asymmetrical block of becom-

ing, an instantaneous zigzag. It is in the vestiges of a double war machine—

that of the Greeks, soon to be supplanted by the State, and that of the

Amazons, soon to be dissolved—that Achilles and Penthesilea, the last

man of war and the last queen of the girls, choose one another, Achilles in a

becoming-woman, Penthesilea in a becoming-dog.

The rites of transvestism or female impersonation in primitive societies

in which a man becomes a woman are not explainable by a social organiza-

tion that places the given relations in correspondence, or by a psychic

organization that makes the woman desire to become a man just as the man

desires to become a woman.

Social structure and psychic identification

leave too many special factors unaccounted for: the linkage, unleashing,

and communication of the becomings triggered by the transvestite; the

power (puissance) of the resultant becoming-animal; and above all the par-

ticipation of these becomings in a specific war machine. The same applies

for sexuality: it is badly explained by the binary organization of the sexes,

and just as badly by a bisexual organization within each sex. Sexuality

brings into play too great a diversity of conjugated becomings; these are

like n sexes, an entire war machine through which love passes. This is not a

return to those appalling metaphors of love and war, seduction and con-

quest, the battle of the sexes and the domestic squabble, or even the

Strindberg-war: it is only after love is done with and sexuality has dried up

that things appear this way. What counts is that love itself is a war machine

endowed with strange and somewhat terrifying powers. Sexuality is the

production of a thousand sexes, which are so many uncontrollable becom-

ings. Sexuality proceeds by way of the becoming-woman of the man and the

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BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ... D 279

becoming-animal of the human: an emission of particles. There is no need

for bestialism in this, although it may arise, and many psychiatric anec-

dotes document it in ways that are interesting, if oversimplified and conse-

quently off the track, too beastly. It is not a question of "playing" the dog,

like an elderly gentleman on a postcard; it is not so much a question of mak-

ing love with animals. Becomings-animal are basically of another power,

since their reality resides not in an animal one imitates or to which one cor-

responds but in themselves, in that which suddenly sweeps us up and

makes us become—a proximity, an indiscernibility that extracts a shared

element from the animal far more effectively than any domestication, uti-

lization, or imitation could: "the Beast."

If becoming-woman is the first quantum, or molecular segment, with

the becomings-animal that link up with it coming next, what are they all

rushing toward? Without a doubt, toward becoming-imperceptible. The

imperceptible is the immanent end of becoming, its cosmic formula. For

example, Matheson's Shrinking Man passes through the kingdoms of

nature, slips between molecules, to become an unfindable particle in infi-

nite meditation on the infinite. Paul Morand's Monsieur Zero flees the

larger countries, crosses the smallest ones, descends the scale of States,

establishes an anonymous society in Lichtenstein of which he is the only

member, and dies imperceptible, forming the particle 0 with his fingers: "I

am a man who flees by swimming under water, and at whom all the world's

rifles fire. ... I must no longer offer a target." But what does

becoming-imperceptible signify, coming at the end of all the molecular

becomings that begin with becoming-woman? Becoming-imperceptible

means many things. What is the relation between the (anorganic)

imperceptible, the (asignifying) indiscernible, and the (asubjective)

impersonal?

A first response would be: to be like everybody else. That is what

Kierkegaard relates in his story about the "knight of the faith," the man of

becoming: to look at him, one would notice nothing, a bourgeois, nothing

but a bourgeois. That is how Fitzgerald lived: after a real rupture, one suc-

ceeds ... in being just like everybody else. To go unnoticed is by no means

easy. To be a stranger, even to one's doorman or neighbors. If it is so diffi-

cult to be "like" everybody else, it is because it is an affair of becoming. Not

everybody becomes everybody [and everything: tout le monde—Trans.],

makes a becoming of everybody/everything. This requires much asceti-

cism, much sobriety, much creative involution: an English elegance, an

English fabric, blend in with the walls, eliminate the too-perceived, the

too-much-to-be-perceived. "Eliminate all that is waste, death, and

superfluity," complaint and grievance, unsatisfied desire, defense or

pleading, everything that roots each of us (everybody) in ourselves, in our

molarity. For everybody/everything is the molar aggregate, but becoming
everybody/

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everything is another affair, one that brings into play the cosmos with its

molecular components. Becoming everybody/everything (tout le monde) is

to world (faire monde), to make a world (faire un monde). By process of

elimination, one is no longer anything more than an abstract line, or a piece

in a puzzle that is itself abstract. It is by conjugating, by continuing with

other lines, other pieces, that one makes a world that can overlay the first

one, like a transparency. Animal elegance, the camouflage fish, the clan-

destine: this fish is crisscrossed by abstract lines that resemble nothing,

that do not even follow its organic divisions; but thus disorganized,

disarticulated, it worlds with the lines of a rock, sand, and plants, becoming

imperceptible. The fish is like the Chinese poet: not imitative or structural,

but cosmic. Francois Cheng shows that poets do not pursue resemblance,

any more than they calculate "geometric proportions." They retain, extract

only the essential lines and movements of nature; they proceed only by

continued or superposed "traits," or strokes.

It is in this sense that

becoming-everybody/everything, making the world a becoming, is to

world, to make a world or worlds, in other words, to find one's proximities

and zones of indiscernibility. The Cosmos as an abstract machine, and

each world as an assemblage effectuating it. If one reduces oneself to one or

several abstract lines that will prolong itself in and conjugate with others,

producing immediately, directly a world in which it is the world that

becomes, then one becomes-everybody/everything. Kerouac's dream, and

already Virginia Woolf s, was for the writing to be like the line of a Chinese

poem-drawing. She says that it is necessary to "saturate every atom," and

to do that it is necessary to eliminate, to eliminate all that is resemblance

and analogy, but also "to put everything into it": eliminate everything that

exceeds the moment, but put in everything that it includes—and the

moment is not the instantaneous, it is the haecceity into which one slips

and that slips into other haecceities by transparency.

To be present at the

dawn of the world. Such is the link between imperceptibility, indis-

cernibility, and impersonality—the three virtues. To reduce oneself to an

abstract line, a trait, in order to find one's zone of indiscernibility with

other traits, and in this way enter the haecceity and impersonality of the

creator. One is then like grass: one has made the world, everybody/

everything, into a becoming, because one has made a necessarily commu-

nicating world, because one has suppressed in oneself everything that

prevents us from slipping between things and growing in the midst of

things. One has combined "everything" (le "tout"): the indefinite article,

the infinitive-becoming, and the proper name to which one is reduced. Sat-

urate, eliminate, put everything in.

Movement has an essential relation to the imperceptible; it is by nature

imperceptible. Perception can grasp movement only as the displacement

1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... □ 281

of a moving body or the development of a form. Movements, becomings, in

other words, pure relations of speed and slowness, pure affects, are below

and above the threshold of perception. Doubtless, thresholds of perception

are relative; there is always a threshold capable of grasping what eludes

another: the eagle's eye... But the adequate threshold can in turn operate

only as a function of a perceptible form and a perceived, discerned subject.

So that movement in itself continues to occur elsewhere: if we serialize per-

ception, the movement always takes place above the maximum threshold

and below the minimum threshold, in expanding or contracting intervals

(microintervals). Like huge Japanese wrestlers whose advance is too slow

and whose holds are too fast to see, so that what embraces are less the

wrestlers than the infinite slowness of the wait (what is going to happen?)

and the infinite speed of the result (what happened?). What we must do is

reach the photographic or cinematic threshold; but in relation to the

photograph, movement and affect once again took refuge above and below.

When Kierkegaard adopts the marvelous motto, "I look only at the move-

ments,"

he is acting astonishingly like a precursor of the cinema, multi-

plying versions of a love scenario (between Agnes and the merman)

according to variable speeds and slownesses. He has all the more reason to

say that there is no movement that is not infinite; that the movement of the

infinite can occur only by means of affect, passion, love, in a becoming that

is the girl, but without reference to any kind of "mediation"; and that this

movement as such eludes any mediating perception because it is already

effectuated at every moment, and the dancer or lover finds him- or herself

already "awake and walking" the second he or she falls down, and even the

instant he or she leaps.

Movement, like the girl as a fugitive being, cannot

be perceived.

However, we are obliged to make an immediate correction: movement

also "must" be perceived, it cannot but be perceived, the imperceptible is

also the percipiendum. There is no contradiction in this. If movement is

imperceptible by nature, it is so always in relation to a given threshold of

perception, which is by nature relative and thus plays the role of a media-

tion on the plane that effects the distribution of thresholds and percepts

and makes forms perceivable to perceiving subjects. It is the plane of

organization and development, the plane of transcendence, that renders

perceptible without itself being perceived, without being capable of being

perceived. But on the other plane, the plane of immanence or consistency,

the principle of composition itself must be perceived, cannot but be per-

ceived at the same time as that which it composes or renders. In this case,

movement is no longer tied to the mediation of a relative threshold that it

eludes ad infinitum; it has reached, regardless of its speed or slowness, an

absolute but differentiated threshold that is one with the construction of

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this or that region of the continued plane. It could also be said that move-

ment ceases to be the procedure of an always relative deterritorialization,

becoming the process of absolute deterritorialization. The difference

between the two planes accounts for the fact that what cannot be perceived

on one cannot but be perceived on the other. It is in jumping from one plane

to the other, or from the relative thresholds to the absolute threshold that

coexists with them, that the imperceptible becomes necessarily perceived.

Kierkegaard shows that the plane of the infinite, which he calls the plane of

faith, must become a pure plane of immanence that continually and imme-

diately imparts, reimparts, and regathers the finite: unlike the man of infi-

nite resignation, the knight of the faith or man of becoming will get the girl,

he will have all of the finite and perceive the imperceptible, as "heir appar-

ent to the finite."

Perception will no longer reside in the relation between a

subject and an object, but rather in the movement serving as the limit of

that relation, in the period associated with the subject and object. Percep-

tion will confront its own limit; it will be in the midst of things, throughout

its own proximity, as the presence of one haecceity in another, the

prehension of one by the other or the passage from one to the other: Look

only at the movements.

It is odd that the word "faith" should be used to designate a plane that

works by immanence. But if the knight is the man of becoming, then there

are all kinds of knights. Are there not even knights of narcotics, in the sense

that faith is a drug (in a way very different from the sense in which religion

is an opiate)? These knights claim that drugs, under necessary conditions

of caution and experimentation, are inseparable from the deployment of a

plane. And on this plane not only are becomings-woman,

becomings-animal, becomings-molecular, becomings-imperceptible

conjugated, but the imperceptible itself becomes necessarily perceived at

the same time as perception becomes necessarily molecular: arrive at

holes, microintervals between matters, colors and sounds engulfing lines

of flight, world lines, lines of transparency and intersection.

Change

perception; the problem has been formulated correctly because it presents

"drugs" as a pregnant whole free of secondary distinctions (hallucinatory

or nonhallucinatory, hard or soft, etc.). All drugs fundamentally concern

speeds, and modifications of speed. What allows us to describe an overall

Drug assemblage in spite of the differences between drugs is a line of

perceptive causality that makes it so that (1) the imperceptible is perceived;

(2) perception is molecular; (3) desire directly invests the perception and

the perceived. The Americans of the beat generation had already

embarked on this path, and spoke of a molecular revolution specific to

drugs. Then came Castaneda's broad synthesis. Leslie Fiedler set forth the

poles of the American Dream: cornered between two nightmares, the

genocide of the Indians and the slav-

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BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ... D 283

ery of the blacks, Americans constructed a psychically repressed image of

the black as the force of affect, of the multiplication of affects, but a socially

repressed image of the Indian as subtlety of perception, perception made

increasingly keen and more finely divided, infinitely slowed or acceler-

ated.

In Europe, Henri Michaux tended to be more willing to free himself

of rites and civilizations, establishing admirable and minute protocols of

experience, doing away with the question of causality with respect to drugs,

delimiting drugs as well as possible, separating them from delirium and

hallucination. But at this point everything reconnects: again, the problem

is well formulated if we say that drugs eliminate forms and persons, if we

bring into play the mad speeds of drugs and the extraordinary posthigh

slownesses, if we clasp one to the other like wrestlers, if we confer upon per-

ception the molecular power to grasp microperceptions, microoperations,

and upon the perceived the force to emit accelerated or decelerated parti-

cles in a floating time that is no longer our time, and to emit haecceities that

are no longer of this world: deterritorialization, "I was disoriented . . ." (a

perception of things, thoughts, desires in which desire, thought, and the

thing have invaded all of perception: the imperceptible finally perceived).

Nothing left but the world of speeds and slownesses without form, without

subject, without a face. Nothing left but the zigzag of a line, like "the lash of

the whip of an enraged cart driver" shredding faces and landscapes.

whole rhizomatic labor of perception, the moment when desire and per-

ception meld.

This problem of specific causality is an important one. Invoking causali-

ties that are too general or are extrinsic (psychological or sociological) is as

good as saying nothing. There is a discourse on drugs current today that

does no more than dredge up generalities on pleasure and misfortune, on

difficulties in communication, on causes that always come from some-

where else. The more incapable people are of grasping a specific causality

in extension, the more they pretend to understand the phenomenon in

question. There is no doubt that an assemblage never contains a causal

infrastructure. It does have, however, and to the highest degree, an abstract

line of creative or specific causality, its line of flight or of deterritorializa-
tion; this line can be effectuated only in connection with general causalities

of another nature, but is in no way explained by them. It is our belief that

the issue of drugs can be understood only at the level where desire directly

invests perception, and perception becomes molecular at the same time as

the imperceptible is perceived. Drugs then appear as the agent of this

becoming. This is where pharmacoanalysis would come in, which must be

both compared and contrasted to psychoanalysis. For psychoanalysis must

be taken simultaneously as a model, a contrasting approach, and a betrayal.

Psychoanalysis can be taken as a model of reference because it was able,

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with respect to essentially affective phenomena, to construct the schema of

a specific causality divorced from ordinary social or psychological general-

ities. But this schema still relies on a plane of organization that can never be

apprehended in itself, that is always concluded from something else, that is

always inferred, concealed from the system of perception: it is called the

Unconscious. Thus the plane of the Unconscious remains a plane of tran-

scendence guaranteeing, justifying, the existence of psychoanalysis and the

necessity of its interpretations. This plane of the Unconscious stands in

molar opposition to the perception-consciousness system, and because

desire must be translated onto this plane, it is itself linked to gross

molarities, like the submerged part of an iceberg (the Oedipal structure, or

the rock of castration). The imperceptible thus remains all the more imper-

ceptible because it is opposed to the perceived in a dualism machine.

Everything is different on the plane of consistency or immanence, which is

necessarily perceived in its own right in the course of its construction:

experimentation replaces interpretation, now molecular, nonfigurative,

and nonsymbolic, the unconscious as such is given in microperceptions;

desire directly invests the field of perception, where the imperceptible

appears as the perceived object of desire itself, "the nonfigurative of

desire." The unconscious no longer designates the hidden principle of the

transcendent plane of organization, but the process of the immanent plane

of consistency as it appears on itself in the course of its construction. For

the unconscious must be constructed, not rediscovered. There is no longer

a conscious-unconscious dualism machine, because the unconscious is, or

rather is produced, there where consciousness goes, carried by the plane.

Drugs give the unconscious the immanence and plane that psychoanalysis

has consistently botched (perhaps the famous cocaine episode marked a

turning point that forced Freud to renounce a direct approach to the

unconscious).

But if it is true that drugs are linked to this immanent, molecular percep-

tive causality, we are still faced with the question of whether they actually

succeed in drawing the plane necessary for their action. The causal line, or

the line of flight, of drugs is constantly being segmentarized under the most

rigid of forms, that of dependency, the hit and the dose, the dealer. Even in

its supple form, it can mobilize gradients and thresholds of perception

toward becomings-animal, becomings-molecular, but even this is done in

the context of a relativity of thresholds that restrict themselves to imitating

a plane of consistency rather than drawing it on an absolute threshold.

What good does it do to perceive as fast as a quick-flying bird if speed and

movement continue to escape somewhere else? The deterritorializations

remain relative, compensated for by the most abject reterritorializations,

so that the imperceptible and perception continually pursue or run after

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BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ... D 285

each other without ever truly coupling. Instead of holes in the world allow-

ing the world lines themselves to run off, the lines of flight coil and start to

swirl in black holes; to each addict a hole, group or individual, like a snail.

Down, instead of high. The molecular microperceptions are overlaid in

advance, depending on the drug, by hallucinations, delusions, false percep-

tions, phantasies, or paranoid outbursts; they restore forms and subjects

every instant, like so many phantoms or doubles continually blocking con-

struction of the plane. Moreover, as we saw in our enumeration of the dan-

gers, not only is the plane of consistency in danger of being betrayed or

thrown offtrack through the influence of other causalities that intervene in

an assemblage of this kind, but the plane itself engenders dangers of its

own, by which it is dismantled at the same time as it is constructed. We are

no longer, it itself is no longer master of speeds. Instead of making a body

without organs sufficiently rich or full for the passage of intensities, drug

addicts erect a vitrified or emptied body, or a cancerous one: the causal

line, creative line, or line of flight immediately turns into a line of death

and abolition. The abominable vitrification of the veins, or the purulence

of the nose—the glassy body of the addict. Black holes and lines of death,

Artaud's and Michaux's warnings converge (they are more technical, more

consistent than the informational, psychoanalytic, or sociopsychological

discourse of treatment and assistance centers). Artaud: You will not avoid

hallucinations, erroneous perceptions, shameless phantasies, or bad feel-

ings, like so many black holes on the plane of consistency, because your

conscious will also go in that booby-trapped direction.

Michaux: You will

no longer be master of your speeds, you will get stuck in a mad race between

the imperceptible and perception, a race all the more circular now that

everything is relative.

You will be full of yourself, you will lose control,

you will be on a plane of consistency, in a body without organs, but at a

place where you will always botch them, empty them, undo what you do,

motionless rags. These words are so much simpler than "erroneous percep-

tions" (Artaud) or "bad feelings" (Michaux), but say the most technical of

things: that the immanent molecular and perceptive causality of desire

fails in the drug-assemblage. Drug addicts continually fall back into what

they wanted to escape: a segmentarity all the more rigid for being marginal,

a territorialization all the more artificial for being based on chemical sub-

stances, hallucinatory forms, and phantasy subjectifications. Drug addicts

may be considered as precursors or experimenters who tirelessly blaze new

paths of life, but their cautiousness lacks the foundation for caution. So

they either join the legion of false heroes who follow the conformist path of

a little death and a long fatigue. Or, what is worse, all they will have done is

make an attempt only nonusers or former users can resume and benefit

from, secondarily rectifying the always aborted plane of drugs, discovering

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through drugs what drugs lack for the construction of a plane of consis-

tency. Is the mistake drug users make always to start over again from

ground zero, either going on the drug again or quitting, when what they

should do is make it a stopover, to start from the "middle," bifurcate from

the middle? To succeed in getting drunk, but on pure water (Henry Miller).

To succeed in getting high, but by abstention, "to take and abstain, espe-

cially abstain," I am a drinker of water (Michaux). To reach the point where

"to get high or not to get high" is no longer the question, but rather whether

drugs have sufficiently changed the general conditions of space and time

perception so that nonusers can succeed in passing through the holes in the

world and following the lines of flight at the very place where means other

than drugs become necessary. Drugs do not guarantee immanence; rather,

the immanence of drugs allows one to forgo them. Is it cowardice or exploi-

tation to wait until others have taken the risks? No, it is joining an under-

taking in the middle, while changing the means. It is necessary to choose

the right molecule, the water, hydrogen, or helium molecule. This has noth-

ing to do with models, all models are molar: it is necessary to determine the

molecules and particles in relation to which "proximities"

(indiscern-ibilities, becomings) are engendered and defined. The vital

assemblage, the life-assemblage, is theoretically or logically possible with

all kinds of molecules, silicon, for example. But it so happens that this

assemblage is not machinically possible with silicon: the abstract machine

does not let it pass because it does not distribute zones of proximity that

construct the plane of consistency.

We shall see that machinic reasons are

entirely different from logical reasons or possibilities. One does not

conform to a model, one straddles the right horse. Drug users have not

chosen the right molecule or the right horse. Drugs are too unwieldy to

grasp the imperceptible and becomings-imperceptible; drug users believed

that drugs would grant them the plane, when in fact the plane must distill

its own drugs, remaining master of speeds and proximities.

Memories of the Secret. The secret has a privileged, but quite variable,

relation to perception and the imperceptible. The secret relates first of all

to certain contents. The content is too big for its form ... or else the con-

tents themselves have a form, but that form is covered, doubled, or

replaced by a simple container, envelope, or box whose role it is to suppress

formal relations. These are contents it has been judged fitting to isolate or

disguise for various reasons. Drawing up a list of these reasons (shame,

treasure, divinity, etc.) has limited value as long as the secret is opposed to

its discovery as in a binary machine having only two terms, the secret and

disclosure, the secret and desecration. For on the one hand, the secret as

content is superseded by a perception of the secret, which is no less secret

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BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ... D 287

than the secret. It matters little what the goal is, and whether the aim of the

perception is a denunciation, final divulging, or disclosure. From an anec-

dotal standpoint, the perception of the secret is the opposite of the secret,

but from the standpoint of the concept, it is a part of it. What counts is that

the perception of the secret must necessarily be secret itself: the spy, the

voyeur, the blackmailer, the author of anonymous letters are no less secre-

tive than what they are in a position to disclose, regardless of their ulterior

motives. There is always a woman, a child, a bird to secretly perceive the

secret. There is always a perception finer than yours, a perception of your

imperceptible, of what is in your box. We can even envision a profession of

secrecy for those who are in a position to perceive the secret. The protector

of the secret is not necessarily in on it, but is also tied to a perception, since

he or she must perceive and detect those who wish to discover the secret

(counterespionage). There is thus a first direction, in which the secret

moves toward an equally secretive perception, a perception that seeks to be

imperceptible itself. A wide variety of very different figures may revolve

around this first point. And then there is a second point, just as inseparable

from the secret as its content: the way in which it imposes itself and

spreads. Once again, whatever the finalities or results, the secret has a way

of spreading that is in turn shrouded in secrecy. The secret as secretion. The

secret must sneak, insert, or introduce itself into the arena of public forms;

it must pressure them and prod known subjects into action (we are refer-

ring to influence of the "lobby" type, even if the lobby is not in itself a secret

society).

In short, the secret, defined as a content that has hidden its form in favor

of a simple container, is inseparable from two movements that can acci-

dentally interrupt its course or betray it, but are nonetheless an essential

part of it: something must ooze from the box, something will be perceived

through the box or in the half-opened box. The secret was invented by soci-

ety; it is a sociological or social notion. Every secret is a collective assem-

blage. The secret is not at all an immobilized or static notion. Only

becomings are secrets; the secret has a becoming. The secret has its origin

in the war machine; it is the war machine and its becomings-woman,

becomings-child, becomings-animal that bring the secret.

A secret soci-

ety always acts in society as a war machine. Sociologists who have studied

secret societies have determined many of their laws: protection,

equalization and hierarchy, silence, ritual, deindividuation, centraliza-

tion, autonomy, compartmentalization, etc.

But perhaps they have not

given enough weight to the principal laws governing the movement of con-

tent: (1) every secret society has a still more secret hindsociety, which either

perceives the secret, protects it, or metes out the punishment for its disclo-

sure (it is not at all begging the question to define the secret society by the

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presence of a secret hindsociety: a society is secret when it exhibits this

doubling, has this special section); (2) every secret society has its own mode

of action, which is in turn secret; the secret society may act by influence,

creeping, insinuation, oozing, pressure, or invisible rays; "passwords" and

secret languages (there is no contradiction here; the secret society cannot

live without the universal project of permeating all of society, of creeping

into all of the forms of society, disrupting its hierarchy and segmentation;

the secret hierarchy conjugates with a conspiracy of equals, it commands

its members to swim in society as fish in water, but conversely society must

be like water around fish; it needs the complicity of the entire surrounding

society). This is evident in cases as diverse as the mob groups of the United

States and the animal-men of Africa: on the one hand, there is the mode of

influence of the secret society and its leaders on the political or public fig-

ures of its surroundings; and on the other hand, there is the secret society's

mode of doubling itself with a hindsociety, which may constitute a special

section of killers or guards.

Influence and doubling, secretion and concre-

tion, every secret operates between two "discreets" [discrets: also "discrete

(terms)"—Trans.] that can, moreover, link or meld in certain cases. The

child's secret combines these elements to marvelous effect: the secret as a

content in a box, the secret influence and propagation of the secret, the

secret perception of the secret (the child's secret is not composed of minia-

turized adult secrets but is necessarily accompanied by a secret perception

of the adult secret). A child discovers a secret...

But the becoming of the secret compels it not to content itself with con-

cealing its form in a simple container, or with swapping it for a container.

The secret, as secret, must now acquire its own form. The secret is elevated

from a finite content to the infinite form of secrecy. This is the point at

which the secret attains absolute imperceptibility, instead of being linked

to a whole interplay of relative perceptions and reactions. We go from a

content that is well defined, localized, and belongs to the past, to the a pri-

ori general form of a nonlocalizable something that has happened. We go

from the secret defined as a hysterical childhood content to secrecy

defined as an eminently virile paranoid form. And this form displays the

same two concomitants of the secret, the secret perception and the mode of

action by secret influence; but these concomitants have become "traits" of

a form they ceaselessly reconstitute, reform, recharge. On the one hand,

paranoiacs denounce the international plot of those who steal their secrets,

their most intimate thoughts; or they declare that they have the gift of per-

ceiving the secrets of others before they have formed (someone with para-

noid jealousy does not apprehend the other in the act of escaping; they

divine or foresee the slightest intention of it). On the other hand, paranoi-

acs act by means of, or else suffer from, rays they emit or receive (Raymond

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BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ... D 289

Roussel and Schreber). Influence by rays, and doubling by flight or echo,

are what now give the secret its infinite form, in which perceptions as well

as actions pass into imperceptibility. Paranoid judgment is like an antici-

pation of perception replacing empirical research into boxes and their con-

tents: guilty a priori, and in any event! (for example, the evolution of the

narrator of the Recherche in relation to Albertine). We can say, in summary

fashion, that psychoanalysis has gone from a hysterical to an increasingly

paranoid conception of the secret.

Interminable analysis: the Uncon-

scious has been assigned the increasingly difficult task of itself being the

infinite form of secrecy, instead of a simple box containing secrets. You will

tell all, but in saying everything you will say nothing because all the "art" of

psychoanalysis is required in order to measure your contents against the

pure form. At this point, however, after the secret has been raised to the

level of a form in this way, an inevitable adventure befalls it. When the

question "What happened?" attains this infinite virile form, the answer is

necessarily that nothing happened, and both form and content are

destroyed. The news travels fast that the secret of men is nothing, in truth

nothing at all. Oedipus, the phallus, castration, "the splinter in the flesh"—

that was the secret? It is enough to make women, children, lunatics, and

molecules laugh.

The more the secret is made into a structuring, organizing form, the

thinner and more ubiquitous it becomes, the more its content becomes

molecular, at the same time as its form dissolves. It really wasn't much, as

Jocasta says. The secret does not as a result disappear, but it does take on a

more feminine status. What was behind President Schreber's paranoid

secret all along, if not a becoming-feminine, a becoming-woman? For

women do not handle the secret in at all the same way as men (except when

they reconstitute an inverted image of virile secrecy, a kind of secrecy of the

gyneceum). Men alternately fault them for their indiscretion, their gossip-

ing, and for their solidarity, their betrayal. Yet it is curious how a woman

can be secretive while at the same time hiding nothing, by virtue of trans-

parency, innocence, and speed. The complex assemblage of secrecy in

courtly love is properly feminine and operates in the most complete trans-

parency. Celerity against gravity. The celerity of a war machine against the

gravity of a State apparatus. Men adopt a grave attitude, knights of the

secret: "You see what burden I bear: my seriousness, my discretion." But

they end up telling everything—and it turns out to be nothing. There are

women, on the other hand, who tell everything, sometimes in appalling

technical detail, but one knows no more at the end than at the beginning;

they have hidden everything by celerity, by limpidity. They have no secret

because they have become a secret themselves. Are they more politic than

we? Iphigenia. Innocent a priori. That is the girl's defense against the

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judgment preferred by men: "guilty a priori" ... This is where the secret
reaches its ultimate state: its content is molecularized, it has become
molecular, at the same time as its form has been dismantled, becoming a
pure moving line—in the sense in which it can be said a given line is the
"secret" of a painter, or a given rhythmic cell, a given sound molecule
(which does not constitute a theme or form) the "secret" of a musician.

If ever there was a writer who dealt with the secret, it was Henry James.

In this respect, he went through an entire evolution, like a perfecting of his
art. For he began by looking for the secret in contents, even insignificant,
half-opened ones, contents briefly glimpsed. Then he raised the possibility
of there being an infinite form of secrecy that no longer even requires a con-
tent and that has conquered the imperceptible. But he raises this possi-
bility only in order to ask the question, Is the secret in the content or in the
form? And the answer is already apparent: neither.

James is one of those

writers who is swept up in an irresistible becoming-woman. He never
stopped pursuing his goal, inventing the necessary technical means.
Mo-lecularize the content of the secret and linearize its form. James
explored it all, from the becoming-child of the secret (there is always a
child who discovers secrets: What Maisie Knew) to the becoming-woman
of the secret (secrecy by a transparency that is no longer anything more
than a pure line that scarcely leaves any traces of its own passage; the
admirable Daisy Miller). James is not as close to Proust as people say; it is
he who raises the cry, "Innocent a priori!" (all Daisy asked for was a little
respect, she would have given her love for that. . .) in opposition to the
"Guilty a priori" that condemns Albertine. What counts in the secret is
less its three states (child's content, virile infinite form, pure feminine
line) than the becomings attached to them, the becoming-child of the
secret, its becoming-feminine, its becoming-molecular—which occur
precisely at the point where the secret has lost both its content and its form,
where the imperceptible, the clandestine with nothing left to hide, has
finally been perceived. From the gray eminence to the gray immanence.
Oedipus passes through all three secrets: the secret of the sphinx whose
box he penetrates; the secret that weighs upon him as the infinite form of
his own guilt; and finally, the secret at Colonus that makes him inaccessible
and melds with the pure line of his flight and exile, he who has nothing
left to hide, or, like an old No actor, has only a girl's mask with which to
cover his lack of a face. Some people can talk, hide nothing, not lie: they
are secret by transparency, as impenetrable as water, in truth
incomprehensible. Whereas the others have a secret that is always
breached, even though they surround it with a thick wall or elevate it to an
infinite form.

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BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 291

Memories and Becomings, Points and Blocks. Why are there so many

becomings of man, but no becoming-man? First because man is

major-itarian par excellence, whereas becomings are minoritarian; all

becoming is a becoming-minoritarian. When we say majority, we are

referring not to a greater relative quantity but to the determination of a

state or standard in relation to which larger quantities, as well as the

smallest, can be said to be minoritarian: white-man, adult-male, etc.

Majority implies a state of domination, not the reverse. It is not a question

of knowing whether there are more mosquitoes or flies than men, but of

knowing how "man" constituted a standard in the universe in relation to

which men necessarily (analytically) form a majority. The majority in a

government presupposes the right to vote, and not only is established

among those who possess that right but is exercised over those who do

not, however great their numbers; similarly, the majority in the universe

assumes as pregiven the right and power of man.

In this sense women,

children, but also animals, plants, and molecules, are minoritarian. It is

perhaps the special situation of women in relation to the man-standard

that accounts for the fact that becomings, being minoritarian, always pass

through a becoming-woman. It is important not to confuse "minoritarian,"

as a becoming or process, with a "minority", as an aggregate or a state.

Jews, Gypsies, etc., may constitute minorities under certain conditions,

but that in itself does not make them becomings. One reterritorializes, or

allows oneself to be reterritorialized, on a minority as a state; but in a

becoming, one is deterritorialized. Even blacks, as the Black Panthers

said, must become-black. Even women must become-woman. Even Jews

must become-Jewish (it certainly takes more than a state). But if this is

the case, then becoming-Jewish necessarily affects the non-Jew as much

as the Jew. Becoming-woman necessary affects men as much as women. In

a way, the subject in a becoming is always "man," but only when he

enters a becoming-minoritarian that rends him from his major identity.

As in Arthur Miller's novel, Focus, or Losey's film, Mr. Klein: it is the

non-Jew who becomes Jewish, who is swept up in, carried off by, this

becoming after being rent from his standard of measure. Conversely, if

Jews themselves must become-Jewish, if women must become-woman, if

children must become-child, if blacks must become-black, it is because

only a minority is capable of serving as the active medium of becoming,

but under such conditions that it ceases to be a definable aggregate in

relation to the majority. Becoming-Jewish, becoming-woman, etc.,

therefore imply two simultaneous movements, one by which a term (the

subject) is withdrawn from the majority, and another by which a term

(the medium or agent) rises up from the minority. There is an

asymmetrical and indissociable block of becoming, a block of alliance: the

two "Mr. Kleins,"

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the Jew and the non-Jew, enter into a becoming-Jewish (the same thing

happens in Focus).

A woman has to become-woman, but in a becoming-woman of all man.

A Jew becomes Jewish, but in a becoming-Jewish of the non-Jew. A

becoming-minoritarian exists only by virtue of a deterritorialized medium

and subject that are like its elements. There is no subject of the becoming

except as a deterritorialized variable of the majority; there is no medium of

becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of a minority. We can be

thrown into a becoming by anything at all, by the most unexpected, most

insignificant of things. You don't deviate from the majority unless there is

a little detail that starts to swell and carries you off. It is because the hero of
Focus, the average American, needs glasses that give his nose a vaguely

Semitic air, it is "because of the glasses" that he is thrown into this strange

adventure of the becoming-Jewish of the non-Jew. Anything at all can do

the job, but it always turns out to be a political affair. Becoming-minori-

tarian is a political affair and necessitates a labor of power {puissance), an

active micropolitics. This is the opposite of macropolitics, and even of His-

tory, in which it is a question of knowing how to win or obtain a majority.

As Faulkner said, to avoid ending up a fascist there was no other choice but

to become-black.

Unlike history, becoming cannot be conceptualized in

terms of past and future. Becoming-revolutionary remains indifferent to

questions of a future and a past of the revolution; it passes between the two.

Every becoming is a block of coexistence. The so-called ahistorical socie-

ties set themselves outside history, not because they are content to repro-

duce immutable models or are governed by a fixed structure, but because

they are societies of becoming (war societies, secret societies, etc.). There is

no history but of the majority, or of minorities as defined in relation to the

majority. And yet "how to win the majority" is a totally secondary problem

in relation to the advances of the imperceptible.

Let us try to say it another way: There is no becoming-man because man

is the molar entity par excellence, whereas becomings are molecular. The

faciality function showed us the form under which man constitutes the

majority, or rather the standard upon which the majority is based: white,

male, adult, "rational," etc., in short, the average European, the subject of

enunciation. Following the law of arborescence, it is this central Point that

moves across all of space or the entire screen, and at every turn nourishes a

certain distinctive opposition, depending on which faciality trait is

retained: male-(female), adult-(child), white-(black, yellow, or red);

rational-(animal). The central point, or third eye, thus has the property of

organizing binary distributions within the dualism machines, and of

reproducing itself in the principal term of the opposition; the entire oppo-

sition at the same time resonates in the central point. The constitution of a

1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ... D 293

"majority" as redundancy. Man constitutes himself as a gigantic memory,

through the position of the central point, its frequency (insofar as it is nec-

essarily reproduced by each dominant point), and its resonance (insofar as

all of the points tie in with it). Any line that goes from one point to another

in the aggregate of the molar system, and is thus defined by points answer-

ing to these mnemonic conditions of frequency and resonance, is a part of

the arborescent system.

What constitutes arborescence is the submission of the line to the point.

Of course, the child, the woman, the black have memories; but the Memory

that collects those memories is still a virile majoritarian agency treating

them as "childhood memories," as conjugal, or colonial memories. It is

possible to operate by establishing a conjunction or collocation of contigu-

ous points rather than a relation between distant points: you would then

have phantasies rather than memories. For example, a woman can have a

female point alongside a male point, and a man a male point alongside a

female one. The constitution of these hybrids, however, does not take us

very far in the direction of a true becoming (for example, bisexuality, as the

psychoanalysts note, in no way precludes the prevalence of the masculine

or the majority of the "phallus"). One does not break with the arborescent

schema, one does not reach becoming or the molecular, as long as a line is

connected to two distant points, or is composed of two contiguous points.

A line of becoming is not defined by points that it connects, or by points

that compose it; on the contrary, it passes between points, it comes up

through the middle, it runs perpendicular to the points first perceived,

transversally to the localizable relation to distant or contiguous points.

point is always a point of origin. But a line of becoming has neither begin-

ning nor end, departure nor arrival, origin nor destination; to speak of the

absence of an origin, to make the absence of an origin the origin, is a bad

play on words. A line of becoming has only a middle. The middle is not an

average; it is fast motion, it is the absolute speed of movement. A becoming

is always in the middle; one can only get it by the middle. A becoming is nei-

ther one nor two, nor the relation of the two; it is the in-between, the border

or line of flight or descent running perpendicular to both. If becoming is a

block (a line-block), it is because it constitutes a zone of proximity and

indiscernibility, a no-man's-land, a nonlocalizable relation sweeping up

the two distant or contiguous points, carrying one into the proximity of the

other—and the border-proximity is indifferent to both contiguity and to

distance. The line or block of becoming that unites the wasp and the orchid

produces a shared deterritorialization: of the wasp, in that it becomes a lib-

erated piece of the orchid's reproductive system, but also of the orchid, in

that it becomes the object of an orgasm in the wasp, also liberated from its

own reproduction. A coexistence of two asymmetrical movements that

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combine to form a block, down a line of flight that sweeps away selective

pressures. The line, or the block, does not link the wasp to the orchid, any

more than it conjugates or mixes them: it passes between them, carrying

them away in a shared proximity in which the discernibility of points dis-

appears. The line-system (or block-system) of becoming is opposed to the

point-system of memory. Becoming is the movement by which the line

frees itself from the point, and renders points indiscernible: the rhizome,

the opposite of arborescence; break away from arborescence. Becoming is
an antimemory. Doubtless, there exists a molecular memory, but as a fac-

tor of integration into a majoritarian or molar system. Memories always

have a reterritorialization function. On the other hand, a vector of

deterritorialization is in no way indeterminate; it is directly plugged into

the molecular levels, and the more deterritorialized it is, the stronger is the

contact: it is deterritorialization that makes the aggregate of the molecular

components "hold together." From this point of view, one may contrast a
childhood block, or a becoming-child, with the childhood memory: "a"

molecular child is produced. . . "a" child coexists with us, in a zone of prox-

imity or a block of becoming, on a line of deterritorialization that carries us

both off—as opposed to the child we once were, whom we remember or

phantasize, the molar child whose future is the adult. "This will be child-

hood, but it must not be my childhood," writes Virginia Woolf. {Orlando

already does not operate by memories, but by blocks, blocks of ages, block

of epochs, blocks of the kingdoms of nature, blocks of sexes, forming so

many becomings between things, or so many lines of deterritoriali-

zation.)

Wherever we used the word "memories" in the preceding pages,

we were wrong to do so; we meant to say "becoming," we were saying

becoming.

If the line is opposed to the point (or blocks to memories, becoming to

the faculty of memory), it is not in an absolute way: a punctual system

includes a certain utilization of lines, and the block itself assigns the point

new functions. In a punctual system, a point basically refers to linear coor-

dinates. Not only are a horizontal line and a vertical line represented, but

the vertical moves parallel to itself, and the horizontal superposes other

horizontals upon itself; every point is assigned in relation to the two base

coordinates, but is also marked on a horizontal line of superposition and

on a vertical line or plane of displacement. Finally, two points are con-

nected when any line is drawn from one to the other. A system is termed
punctual'when its lines are taken as coordinates in this way, or as localizable

connections; for example, systems of arborescence, or molar and mne-

monic systems in general, are punctual. Memory has a punctual organiza-

tion because every present refers simultaneously to the horizontal line of
the flow of time (kinematics), which goes from an old present to the actual

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BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 295

present, and the vertical line of the order of time (stratigraphy), which goes

from the present to the past, or to the representation of the old present.

This is, of course, a basic schema that cannot be developed further without

running into major complications, but it is the one found in representa-

tions of art forming a "didactic" system, in other words, a mnemotechnics.

Musical representation, on the one hand, draws a horizontal, melodic line,

the bass line, upon which other melodic lines are superposed; points are

assigned that enter into relations of counterpoint between lines. On the

other hand, it draws a vertical, harmonic line or plane, which moves along

the horizontals but is no longer dependent upon them; it runs from high to

low and defines a chord capable of linking up with the following chords.

Pictorial representation has an analogous form, with means of its own: this

is not only because the painting has a vertical and a horizontal, but because

the traits and colors, each on its own account, relate to verticals of displace-

ment and horizontals of superposition (for example, the vertical cold form,

or white, light and tonality; the horizontal warm form, or black, chromatics

and modality, etc.). To cite only relatively recent examples, this is evident

in the didactic systems of Kandinsky, Klee, and Mondrian, which neces-

sarily imply an encounter with music.

Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a punctual system: (1)

Systems of this kind comprise two base lines, horizontal and vertical; they

serve as coordinates for assigning points. (2) The horizontal line can be

superposed vertically and the vertical line can be moved horizontally, in

such a way that new points are produced or reproduced, under conditions

of horizontal frequency and vertical resonance. (3) From one point to

another, a line can (or cannot) be drawn, but if it can it takes the form of a

localizable connection; diagonals thus play the role of connectors between

points of different levels or moments, instituting in their turn frequencies

and resonances on the basis of these points of variable horizon or verticon,

contiguous or distant.

These systems are arborescent, mnemonic, molar,

structural; they are systems of territorialization or reterritorialization. The

line and the diagonal remain totally subordinated to the point because they

serve as coordinates for a point or as localizable connections for two

points, running from one point to another.

Opposed to the punctual system are linear, or rather multilinear, sys-

tems. Free the line, free the diagonal: every musician or painter has this

intention. One elaborates a punctual system or a didactic representation,

but with the aim of making it snap, of sending a tremor through it. A punc-

tual system is most interesting when there is a musician, painter, writer,

philosopher to oppose it, who even fabricates it in order to oppose it, like a

springboard to jump from. History is made only by those who oppose his-

tory (not by those who insert themselves into it, or even reshape it). This is

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not done for provocation but happens because the punctual system they

found ready-made, or themselves invented, must have allowed this opera-

tion: free the line and the diagonal, draw the line instead of plotting a point,

produce an imperceptible diagonal instead of clinging to an even elabo-

rated or reformed vertical or horizontal. When this is done it always goes

down in History but never comes from it. History may try to break its ties

to memory; it may make the schemas of memory more elaborate, super-

pose and shift coordinates, emphasize connections, or deepen breaks. The

dividing line, however, is not there. The dividing line passes not between

history and memory but between punctual "history-memory" systems and

diagonal or multilinear assemblages, which are in no way eternal: they have

to do with becoming; they are a bit of becoming in the pure state; they are

transhistorical. There is no act of creation that is not transhistorical and

does not come up from behind or proceed by way of a liberated line.

Nietzsche opposes history not to the eternal but to the subhistorical or

superhistorical: the Untimely, which is another name for haecceity,

becoming, the innocence of becoming (in other words, forgetting as

opposed to memory, geography as opposed to history, the map as opposed

to the tracing, the rhizome as opposed to arborescence). "The unhistorical

is like an atmosphere within which alone life can germinate and with the

destruction of which it must vanish. . . . What deed would man be capable

of if he had not first entered into that vaporous region of the unhis-

torical?"

Creations are like mutant abstract lines that have detached

themselves from the task of representing a world, precisely because they

assemble a new type of reality that history can only recontain or relocate in

punctual systems.

When Boulez casts himself in the role of historian of music, he does so in

order to show how a great musician, in a very different manner in each case,

invents a kind of diagonal running between the harmonic vertical and the

melodic horizon. And in each case it is a different diagonal, a different

technique, a creation. Moving along this transversal line, which is really a

line of deterritorialization, there is a sound block that no longer has a point

of origin, since it is always and already in the middle of the line; and no

longer has horizontal and vertical coordinates, since it creates its own coor-

dinates; and no longer forms a localizable connection from one point to

another, since it is in "nonpulsed time": a deterritorialized rhythmic block

that has abandoned points, coordinates, and measure, like a drunken boat

that melds with the line or draws a plane of consistency. Speeds and

slownesses inject themselves into musical form, sometimes impelling it to

proliferation, linear microproliferations, and sometimes to extinction,

sonorous abolition, involution, or both at once. The musician is in the best

position to say: "I hate the faculty of memory, I hate memories." And that is

1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 297

because he or she affirms the power of becoming. The Viennese school is

exemplary of this kind of diagonal, this kind of line-block. But it can

equally be said that the Viennese school found a new system of

territo-rialization, of points, verticals, and horizontals that position it in

History. Another attempt, another creative act, came after it. The

important thing is that all musicians have always proceeded in this way:

drawing their own diagonal, however fragile, outside points, outside

coordinates and localizable connections, in order to float a sound block

down a created, liberated line, in order to unleash in space this mobile

and mutant sound block, a haecceity (for example, chromaticism,

aggregates, and complex notes, but already the resources and possibilities

of polyphony, etc.).

Some have spoken of "oblique vectors" with respect

to the organ. The diagonal is often composed of extremely complex lines

and spaces of sound. Is that the secret of a little phrase or a rhythmic

block? Undoubtedly, the point now assumes a new and essential creative

function. It is no longer simply a question of an inevitable destiny

reconstituting a punctual system; on the contrary, it is now the point that

is subordinated to the line, the point now marks the proliferation of the

line, or its sudden deviation, its acceleration, its slowdown, its furor or

agony. Mozart's "microblocks." The block may even be reduced to a point,

as though to a single note (point-block): Berg's B in Wozzeck, Schumann's

A. Homage to Schumann, the madness of Schumann: the cello wanders

across the grid of the orchestration, drawing its diagonal, along which the

deterritorialized sound block moves; or an extremely sober kind of refrain

is "treated" by a very elaborate melodic line and polyphonic architecture.

In a multilinear system, everything happens at once: the line breaks free

of the point as origin; the diagonal breaks free of the vertical and the hori-

zontal as coordinates; and the transversal breaks free of the diagonal as a

localizable connection between two points. In short, a block-line passes

amid (au milieu des) sounds and propels itself by its own nonlocalizable

middle (milieu). The sound block is the intermezzo. It is a body without

organs, an antimemory pervading musical organization, and is all the

more sonorous: "The Schumannian body does not stay in place. ... The

intermezzo [is] consubstantial with the entire Schumannian oeuvre.... At

the limit, there are only intermezzi. ... The Schumannian body knows

only bifurcations; it does not construct itself, it keeps diverging according

to an accumulation of interludes.... Schumannian beating is panic, but it

is also coded ... and it is because the panic of the blows apparently keeps

within the limits of a docile language that it is ordinarily not perceived.. . .

Let us imagine for tonality two contradictory (and yet concomitant) sta-

tuses. On the one hand ... a screen, a language intended to articulate the

body.. .according to a known organization... .On the other hand, contra-

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dictorily... tonality becomes the ready servant of the beats within another
level it claims to domesticate."

Does the same thing, strictly the same thing, apply to painting? In effect,

the point does not make the line; the line sweeps away the deterritorialized
point, carries it off under its outside influence; the line does not go from
one point to another, but runs between points in a different direction that
renders them indiscernible. The line has become the diagonal, which has
broken free from the vertical and the horizontal. But the diagonal has
already become the transversal, the semidiagonal or free straight line, the
broken or angular line, or the curve—always in the midst of themselves.
Between the white vertical and the black horizontal lie Klee's gray,
Kandinsky's red, Monet's purple; each forms a block of color. This line is
without origin, since it always begins off the painting, which only holds it
by the middle; it is without coordinates, because it melds with a plane of
consistency upon which it floats and that it creates; it is without localizable
connection, because it has lost not only its representative function but any
function of outlining a form of any kind—by this token, the line has
become abstract, truly abstract and mutant, a visual block; and under these
conditions the point assumes creative functions again, as a color-point or
line-point.

The line is between points, in their midst, and no longer goes

from one point to another. It does not outline a shape. "He did not paint
things, he painted between things." There is no falser problem in painting
than depth and, in particular, perspective. For perspective is only a histori-
cal manner of occupying diagonals or transversals, lines of flight [lignes de
fuite: here, the lines in a painting moving toward the vanishing point, or
point de fuite—Trans.], in other words, of reterritorializing the moving vis-
ual block. We use the word "occupy" in the sense of "giving an occupation
to," fixing a memory and a code, assigning a function. But the lines of
flight, the transversals, are suitable for many other functions besides this
molar function. Lines of flight as perspective lines, far from being made to
represent depth, themselves invent the possibility of such a representation,
which occupies them only for an instant, at a given moment. Perspective,
and even depth, are the reterritorialization of lines of flight, which alone
created painting by carrying it farther. What is called central perspective in
particular plunged the multiplicity of escapes and the dynamism of lines
into a punctual black hole. Conversely, it is true that problems of perspec-
tive triggered a whole profusion of creative lines, a mass release of visual
blocks, at the very moment they claimed to have gained mastery over them.
Is painting, in each of its acts of creation, engaged in a becoming as intense
as that of music?

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BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 299

Becoming-Music. We have tried to define in the case of Western music

(although the other musical traditions confront an analogous problem,

under different conditions, to which they find different solutions) a block

of becoming at the level of expression, or a block of expression: this block of

becoming rests on transversals that continually escape from the coordi-

nates or punctual systems functioning as musical codes at a given moment.

It is obvious that there is a block of content corresponding to this block of

expression. It is not really a correspondence; there would be no mobile

"block" if a content, itself musical (and not a subject or a theme), were not

always interfering with the expression. What does music deal with, what is

the content indissociable from sound expression? It is hard to say, but it is

something: a child dies, a child plays, a woman is born, a woman dies, a

bird arrives, a bird flies off. We wish to say that these are not accidental

themes in music (even if it is possible to multiply examples), much less imi-

tative exercises; they are something essential. Why a child, a woman, a

bird? It is because musical expression is inseparable from a

becoming-woman, a becoming-child, a becoming-animal that constitute

its content. Why does the child die, or the bird fall as though pierced by

an arrow? Because of the "danger" inherent in any line that escapes, in

any line of flight or creative deterritorialization: the danger of veering

toward destruction, toward abolition. Melisande [in Debussy's opera,
Pelleas et Melisande—Trans.], a child-woman, a secret, dies twice ("it's

the poor little dear's turn now"). Music is never tragic, music is joy. But

there are times it necessarily gives us a taste for death; not so much

happiness as dying happily, being extinguished. Not as a function of a

death instinct it allegedly awakens in us, but of a dimension proper to its

sound assemblage, to its sound machine, the moment that must be

confronted, the moment the transversal turns into a line of abolition. Peace
and exasperation.

Music has a thirst for destruction, every kind of

destruction, extinction, breakage, dislocation. Is that not its potential

"fascism"? Whenever a musician writes In Memoriam, it is not so much a

question of an inspirational motif or a memory, but on the contrary of a

becoming that is only confronting its own danger, even taking a fall in

order to rise again: a becoming-child, a becoming-woman, a

becoming-animal, insofar as they are the content of music itself and

continue to the point of death.

We would say that the refrain is properly musical content, the block of

content proper to music. A child comforts itself in the dark or claps its

hands or invents a way of walking, adapting it to the cracks in the sidewalk,

or chants "Fort-Da" (psychoanalysts deal with the Fort-Da very poorly

when they treat it as a phonological opposition or a symbolic component of

the language-unconscious, when it is in fact a refrain). Tra la la. A woman

sings to herself, "I heard her softly singing a tune to herself under her

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breath." A bird launches into its refrain. All of music is pervaded by bird

songs, in a thousand different ways, from Jannequin to Messiaen. Frr, Frr.

Music is pervaded by childhood blocks, by blocks of femininity. Music is

pervaded by every minority, and yet composes an immense power. Chil-

dren's, women's, ethnic, and territorial refrains, refrains of love and

destruction: the birth of rhythm. Schumann's work is made of refrains, of

childhood blocks, which he treats in a very special way: his own kind of

becoming-child, his own kind of becoming-woman, Clara. It would be pos-

sible to catalogue the transversal or diagonal utilizations of the refrain in

the history of music, all of the children's Games and Kinderszenen, all of

the bird songs. But such a catalogue would be useless because it would seem

like a multiplication of examples of themes, subjects, and motifs, when it is

in fact a question of the most essential and necessary content of music. The

motif of the refrain may be anxiety, fear, joy, love, work, walking, territory

. . . but the refrain itself is the content of music.

We are not at all saying that the refrain is the origin of music, or that

music begins with it. It is not really known when music begins. The refrain

is rather a means of preventing music, warding it off, or forgoing it. But

music exists because the refrain exists also, because music takes up the

refrain, lays hold of it as a content in a form of expression, because it forms

a block with it in order to take it somewhere else. The child's refrain, which
is not music, forms a block with the becoming-child of music: once again,

this asymmetrical composition is necessary. "Ah, vous dirai-je maman"

("Ah, mamma, now you shall know") in Mozart, Mozart's refrains. A

theme in C, followed by twelve variations; not only is each note of the

theme doubled, but the theme is doubled internally. Music submits the

refrain to this very special treatment of the diagonal or transversal, it

uproots the refrain from its territoriality. Music is a creative, active opera-

tion that consists in deterritorializing the refrain. Whereas the refrain is

essentially territorial, territorializing, or reterritorializing, music makes it

a deterritorialized content for a deterritorializing form of expression. Par-

don that sentence: what musicians do should be musical, it should be writ-

ten in music. Instead, we will give a figurative example: Mussorgsky's

"Lullaby," in Songs and Dances of Death, presents an exhausted mother sit-

ting up with her sick child; she is relieved by a visitor, Death, who sings a

lullaby in which each couplet ends with an obsessive, sober refrain, a repet-

itive rhythm with only one note, a point-block: "Shush, little child, sleep

my little child" (not only does the child die, but the deterritorialization of

the refrain is doubled by Death in person, who replaces the mother).

Is the situation similar for painting, and if so, how? In no way do we

believe in a fine-arts system; we believe in very diverse problems whose

solutions are found in heterogeneous arts. To us, Art is a false concept, a

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BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ... D 301

solely nominal concept; this does not, however, preclude the possibility of a

simultaneous usage of the various arts within a determinable multiplicity.

The "problem" within which painting is inscribed is that of the
face-landscape. That of music is entirely different: it is the problem of

the refrain. Each arises at a certain moment, under certain conditions, on

the line of its problem; but there is no possible structural or symbolic

correspondence between the two, unless one translates them into punctual

systems. We have distinguished the following three states of the

landscape problem: (1) semiotic systems of corporeality, silhouettes,

postures, colors, and lines (these semiotic systems are already present in

profusion among animals; the head is part of the body, and the body has

the milieu, the biotope as its correlate; these systems already display very

pure lines as, for example, in the "grass stem" behavior); (2) an

organization of the face, white wall/black holes, face/eyes, or facial

profile/sideview of the eyes (this semiotic system of faciality has the

landscape as its correlate: facialization of the entire body and

landscapification of all the milieus, Christ as the European central point);

(3) a deterritorialization of faces and landscapes, in favor of probe-heads

whose lines no longer outline a form or form a contour, and whose colors

no longer lay out a landscape (this is the pictorial semiotic system: Put

the face and the landscape to flight. For example, what Mondrian

correctly calls a "landscape": a pure, absolutely deterrito-rialized

landscape).

For convenience, we presented three successive and distinct states, but

only provisionally. We cannot decide whether animals have painting, even

though they do not paint on canvas, and even when hormones induce their

colors and lines; even here, there is little foundation for a clear-cut distinc-

tion between animals and human beings. Conversely, we must say that

painting does not begin with so-called abstract art but recreates the silhou-

ettes and postures of corporeality, and is already fully in operation in the

face-landscape organization (the way in which painters "work" the face of

Christ, and make it leak from the religious code in all directions). The aim

of painting has always been the deterritorialization of faces and land-

scapes, either by a reactivation of corporeality, or by a liberation of lines or

colors, or both at the same time. There are many becomings-animal,

becomings-woman, and becomings-child in painting.

The problem of music is different, if it is true that its problem is the

refrain. Deterritorializing the refrain, inventing lines of deterritorializa-

tion for the refrain, implies procedures and constructions that have noth-

ing to do with those of painting (outside of vague analogies of the sort

painters have often tried to establish). Again, it is not certain whether we

can draw a dividing line between animals and human beings: Are there not,

as Messiaen believes, musician birds and nonmusician birds? Is the bird's

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refrain necessarily territorial, or is it not already used for very subtle

deterritorializations, for selective lines of flight? The difference between

noise and sound is definitely not a basis for a definition of music, or even

for the distinction between musician birds and nonmusician birds. Rather,

it is the labor of the refrain: Does it remain territorial and territorializing,

or is it carried away in a moving block that draws a transversal across all

coordinates—and all of the intermediaries between the two? Music is pre-

cisely the adventure of the refrain: the way music lapses back into a refrain

(in our head, in Swann's head, in the pseudo-probe-heads on TV and radio,

the music of a great musician used as a signature tune, a ditty); the way it

lays hold of the refrain, makes it more and more sober, reduced to a few

notes, then takes it down a creative line that is so much richer, no origin or

end of which is in sight. ..

Leroi-Gourhan established a distinction and correlation between two

poles, "hand-tool" and "face-language." But there it was a question of dis-

tinguishing a form of content and a form of expression. Here we are consid-

ering expressions that hold their content within themselves, so we must

make a different distinction: the face with its visual correlates (eyes) con-

cerns painting; the voice with its auditory correlates (the ear is itself a

refrain, it is shaped like one) concerns music. Music is a

deterrito-rialization of the voice, which becomes less and less tied to

language, just as painting is a deterritorialization of the face. Traits of

vocability can indeed be indexed to traits of faciality, as in lipreading; they

are not, however, in correspondence, especially when they are carried off

by the respective movements of music and painting. The voice is far ahead

of the face, very far ahead. Entitling a musical work Visage (Face) thus

seems to be the greatest of sound paradoxes.

The only way to "line up"

the two problems of painting and music is to take a criterion extrinsic to the

fiction of the fine arts, to compare the forces of deterritorialization in each

case. Music seems to have a much stronger deterritorializing force, at once

more intense and much more collective, and the voice seems to have a much

greater power of deterritorialization. Perhaps this trait explains the

collective fascination exerted by music, and even the potentiality of the

"fascist" danger we mentioned a little earlier: music (drums, trumpets)

draws people and armies into a race that can go all the way to the abyss

(much more so than banners and flags, which are paintings, means of

classification and rallying). It may be that musicians are individually more

reactionary than painters, more religious, less "social"; they nevertheless

wield a collective force infinitely greater than that of painting: "The

chorus formed by the assembly of the people is a very powerful bond..."

It is always possible to explain this force by the material conditions of

musical emission and reception, but it is preferable to take the reverse

approach; these conditions are explained

1730:

BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 303

by the force of deterritorialization of music. It could be said that from the

standpoint of the mutant abstract machine painting and music do not cor-

respond to the same thresholds, or that the pictorial machine and the musi-

cal machine do not have the same index. There is a "backwardness" of

painting in relation to music, as Klee, the most musicianly of painters,

observed.

Maybe that is why many people prefer painting, or why aes-

thetics took painting as its privileged model: there is no question that it

"scares" people less. Even its relations to capitalism and social formations

are not at all of the same type.

Doubtless, in each case we must simultaneously consider factors of

territoriality, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization. Animal and

child refrains seem to be territorial: therefore they are not "music." But

when music lays hold of the refrain and deterritorializes it, and

deterrito-rializes the voice, when it lays hold of the refrain and sends it

racing off in a rhythmic sound block, when the refrain "becomes"

Schumann or Debussy, it is through a system of melodic and harmonic

coordinates by means of which music reterritorializes upon itself, qua

music. Conversely, we shall see that in certain cases even the animal refrain

possesses forces of deterritorialization much more intense than animal

silhouettes, postures, and colors. We must therefore take a number of

factors into consideration: relative territorialities, their respective

deterritorializations, and their correlative reterritorializations, several

types of them (for example, intrinsic reterritorializations such as musical

coordinates, and extrinsic ones such as the deterioration of the refrain

into a hackneyed formula, or music into a ditty). The fact that there is no

deterritorialization without a special reterritorialization should prompt us

to rethink the abiding correlation between the molar and the molecular:

no flow, no becoming-molecular escapes from a molar formation without

molar components accompanying it, forming passages or perceptible

landmarks for the imperceptible processes.

The becoming-woman, the becoming-child of music are present in the

problem of the machining of the voice. Machining the voice was the first

musical operation. As we know, the problem was resolved in Western

music in two different ways, in Italy and in England: the head voice of the

countertenor, who sings "above his voice," or whose voice operates inside

the sinuses and at the back of the throat and the palate without relying on

the diaphragm or passing through the bronchial tubes; and the stomach

voice of the castrati, "stronger, more voluminous, more languid," as if

they gave carnal matter to the imperceptible, impalpable, and aerial.

Dominique Fernandez wrote a fine book on this subject; he shows, fortu-

nately refraining from any psychoanalytic discussion of a link between

music and castration, that the musical problem of the machinery of the

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voice necessarily implies the abolition of the overall dualism machine, in

other words, the molar formation assigning voices to the "man or

woman."

Being a man or a woman no longer exists in music. It is not cer-

tain, however, that the myth of the androgyne Fernandez invokes is ade-

quate. It is a question not of myth but of real becoming. The voice itself

must attain a becoming-woman or a becoming-child. That is the prodi-

gious content of music. It is no longer a question, as Fernandez observes, of

imitating a woman or a child, even if it is a child who is singing. The musi-

cal voice itself becomes-child at the same time as the child

becomes-sonorous, purely sonorous. No child could ever have done that,

or if one did, it would be by becoming in addition something other than a

child, a child belonging to a different, strangely sensual and celestial,

world. In short, the deterritorialization is double: the voice is

deterritorialized in a becoming-child, but the child it becomes is itself

deterritorialized, unen-gendered, becoming. "The child grew wings," said

Schumann. We find the same zigzag movement in the becomings-animal

of music: Marcel More shows that the music of Mozart is permeated by a

becoming-horse, or becomings-bird. But no musician amuses himself by

"playing" horse or bird. If the sound block has a becoming-animal as its

content, then the animal simultaneously becomes, in sonority, something

else, something absolute, night, death, joy—certainly not a generality or a

simplification, but a haecceity, this death, that night. Music takes as its

content a becoming-animal; but in that becoming-animal the horse, for

example, takes as its expression soft kettledrum beats, winged like hooves

from heaven or hell; and the birds find expression in gruppeti,

appoggiaturas, staccato notes that transform them into so many souls.

is the accents that form the diagonal in Mozart, the accents above all. If

one does not follow the accents, if one does not observe them, one falls

back into a relatively impoverished punctual system. The human

musician is deterritorialized in the bird, but it is a bird that is itself

deterritorialized, "transfigured," a celestial bird that has just as much of a

becoming as that which becomes with it. Captain Ahab is engaged in an

irresistible becoming-whale with Moby-Dick; but the animal,

Moby-Dick, must simultaneously become an unbearable pure whiteness,

a shimmering pure white wall, a silver thread that stretches out and supples

up "like" a girl, or twists like a whip, or stands like a rampart. Can it be that

literature sometimes catches up with painting, and even music? And that

painting catches up with music? (More cites Klee's birds but on the other

hand fails to understand what Messiaen says about bird song.) No art is

imitative, no art can be imitative or figurative. Suppose a painter

"represents" a bird; this is in fact a becoming-bird that can occur only to

the extent that the bird itself is in the process of becoming something else, a

pure line and pure color. Thus imitation self-destructs,

1730:

BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 305

since the imitator unknowingly enters into a becoming that conjugates

with the unknowing becoming of that which he or she imitates. One imi-

tates only if one fails, when one fails. The painter and musician do not imi-

tate the animal, they become-animal at the same time as the animal

becomes what they willed, at the deepest level of their concord with

Nature.

Becoming is always double, that which one becomes becomes no

less than the one that becomes—block is formed, essentially mobile, never

in equilibrium. Mondrian's is the perfect square. It balances on one corner

and produces a diagonal that half-opens its closure, carrying away both

sides.

Becoming is never imitating. When Hitchcock does birds, he does not

reproduce bird calls, he produces an electronic sound like a field of intensi-

ties or a wave of vibrations, a continuous variation, like a terrible threat

welling up inside us.

And this applies not only to the "arts": Moby-Dick^

effect also hinges the pure lived experience of double becoming, and the

book would not have the same beauty otherwise. The tarantella is a strange

dance that magically cures or exorcises the supposed victims of a tarantula

bite. But when the victim does this dance, can he or she be said to be imitat-

ing the spider, to be identifying with it, even in an identification through an

"archetypal" or "agonistic" struggle? No, because the victim, the patient,

the person who is sick, becomes a dancing spider only to the extent that the

spider itself is supposed to become a pure silhouette, pure color and pure

sound to which the person dances.

One does not imitate; one constitutes

a block of becoming. Imitation enters in only as an adjustment of the block,

like a finishing touch, a wink, a signature. But everything of importance

happens elsewhere: in the becoming-spider of the dance, which occurs on

the condition that the spider itself becomes sound and color, orchestra and

painting. Take the case of the local folk hero, Alexis the Trotter, who ran

"like" a horse at extraordinary speed, whipped himself with a short switch,

whinnied, reared, kicked, knelt, lay down on the ground in the manner of a

horse, competed against them in races, and against bicycles and trains. He

imitated a horse to make people laugh. But he had a deeper zone of proxim-

ity or indiscernibility. Sources tell us that he was never as much of a horse

as when he played the harmonica: precisely because he no longer needed a

regulating or secondary imitation. It is said that he called his harmonica his

"chops-destroyer" and played the instrument twice as fast as anyone else,

doubled the beat, imposed a nonhuman tempo.

Alexis became all the

more horse when the horse's bit became a harmonica, and the horse's trot

went into double time. As always, the same must be said of the animals

themselves. For not only do animals have colors and sounds, but they do

not wait for the painter or musician to use those colors and sounds in a

painting or music, in other words, to enter into determinate becomings-

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color and becomings-sounds by means of components of

deterrito-rialization (we will return to this point later). Ethology is

advanced enough to have entered this realm.

We are not at all arguing for an aesthetics of qualities, as if the pure

quality (color, sound, etc.) held the secret of a becoming without measure,

as in Philebus. Pure qualities still seem to us to be punctual systems: They

are reminiscences, they are either transcendent or floating memories or

seeds of phantasy. A functionalist conception, on the other hand, only

considers the function a quality fulfills in a specific assemblage, or in

passing from one assemblage to another. The quality must be considered

from the standpoint of the becoming that grasps it, instead of becoming

being considered from the standpoint of intrinsic qualities having the

value of archetypes or phylogenetic memories. For example, whiteness,

color, is gripped in a becoming-animal that can be that of the painter or of

Captain Ahab, and at the same time in a becoming-color, a

becoming-whiteness, that can be that of the animal itself. Moby-Dick's

whiteness is the special index of his becoming-solitary. Colors,

silhouettes, and animal refrains are indexes of becoming-conjugal or

becoming-social that also imply components of deterritorialization. A

quality functions only as a line of deterritorialization of an assemblage, or

in going from one assemblage to another. This is why an animal-block is

something other than a phylogenetic memory, and a childhood block

something other than a childhood memory. In Kafka, a quality never

functions for itself or as a memory, but rather rectifies an assemblage in

which it is deterritori-alized, and, conversely, for which it provides a line

of deterritorialization; for example, the childhood steeple passes into the

castle tower, takes it at the level of its zone of indiscernibility

("battlements that were irregular, broken, fumbling"), and launches down

a line of flight (as if one of the tenants "had burst through the roof').

things are more complicated and less sober for Proust, it is because for

him qualities retain an air of reminiscence or phantasy, and yet with

Proust as well these are functional blocks acting not as memories or

phantasies but as a becoming-child, a becoming-woman, as components

of deterritorialization passing from one assemblage to another.

To the theorems of simple deterritorialization we encountered earlier

(in our discussion of the face),

100

we can now add others on generalized

double deterritorialization. Theorem Five: deterritorialization is always

double, because it implies the coexistence of a major variable and a minor

variable in simultaneous becoming (the two terms of a becoming do not

exchange places, there is no identification between them, they are instead

drawn into an asymmetrical block in which both change to the same extent,

and which constitutes their zone of proximity). Theorem Six: in non-

1730:

BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ... D 307

symmetrical double deterritorialization it is possible to assign a

deter-ritorializing force and a deterritorialized force, even if the same

force switches from one value to the other depending on the "moment" or

aspect considered; furthermore, it is the least deterritorialized element

that always triggers the deterritorialization of the most deterritorializing

element, which then reacts back upon it in full force. Theorem Seven: the

deterritorializing element has the relative role of expression, and the

deterritorialized element the relative role of content (as evident in the

arts); but not only does the content have nothing to do with an external sub-

ject or object, since it forms an asymmetrical block with the expression, but

the deterritorialization carries the expression and the content to a proxim-

ity where the distinction between them ceases to be relevant, or where the

deterritorialization creates their indiscernibility (example: the sound diag-

onal as the musical form of expression, and becomings-woman, -child,

-animal as the contents proper to music, as refrains). Theorem Eight: one

assemblage does not have the same forces or even speeds of deterrito-

rialization as another; in each instance, the indices and coefficients must

be calculated according to the block of becoming under consideration, and

in relation to the mutations of an abstract machine (for example, there is a

certain slowness, a certain viscosity, of painting in relation to music; but

one cannot draw a symbolic boundary between the human being and ani-

mal. One can only calculate and compare powers of deterritorialization).

Fernandez demonstrates the presence of becomings-woman, becom-

ings-child in vocal music. Then he decries the rise of instrumental and

orchestral music; he is particularly critical of Verdi and Wagner for having

resexualized the voice, for having restored the binary machine in response

to the requirements of capitalism, which wants a man to be a man and a

woman a woman, each with his or her own voice: Verdi-voices,

Wagner-voices, are reterritorialized upon man and woman. He explains the

premature disappearance of Rossini and Bellini (the retirement of the first

and death of the second) by their hopeless feeling that the vocal

becomings of the opera were no longer possible. However, Fernandez does

not ask under what auspices, and with what new types of diagonals, this

occurs. To begin with, it is true that the voice ceases to be machined for

itself, with simple instrumental accompaniment; it ceases to be a stratum

or a line of expression that stands on its own. But why? Music crossed a

new threshold of deterritorialization, beyond which it is the instrument

that machines the voice, and the voice and instrument are carried on the
same plane in a relation that is sometimes one of confrontation, sometimes

one of compensation, sometimes one of exchange and complementarity.

The lied, in particular Schumann's lieder, perhaps marks the first

appearance of this pure movement that places the voice and the piano on

the same plane of

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consistency, makes the piano an instrument of delirium, and prepares the

way for Wagnerian opera. Even a case like Verdi's: it has often been said

that his opera remains lyrical and vocal in spite of its destruction of the bel

canto, and in spite of the importance of orchestration in the final works;

still, voices are instrumentalized and make extraordinary gains in tessitura

or extension (the production of the Verdi-baritone, of the Verdi-soprano).

At any rate, the issue is not a given composer, especially not Verdi, or a

given genre, but the more general movement affecting music, the slow

mutation of the musical machine. If the voice returns to a binary distribu-

tion of the sexes, this occurs in relation to binary groupings of instruments

in orchestration. There are always molar systems in music that serve as

coordinates; this dualist system of the sexes that reappears on the level of

the voice, this molar and punctual distribution, serves as a foundation for

new molecular flows that then intersect, conjugate, are swept up in a kind

of instrumentation and orchestration that tend to be part of the creation

itself. Voices may be reterritorialized on the distribution of the two sexes,

but the continuous sound flow still passes between them as in a difference

of potential.

This brings us to the second point: the principal problem concerning

this new threshold of deterritorialization of the voice is no longer that of a

properly vocal becoming-woman or becoming-child, but that of a

becoming-molecular in which the voice itself is instrumentalized. Of

course, becomings-woman and -child remain just as important, even take

on new importance, but only to the extent that they convey another truth:

what was produced was already a molecular child, a molecular woman .. .

We need only think of Debussy: the becoming-child and the

becoming-woman in his works are intense but are now inseparable from

a molecu-larization of the motif, a veritable "chemistry" achieved

through orchestration. The child and the woman are now inseparable from

the sea and the water molecule (Sirens, precisely, represents one of the

first complete attempts to integrate the voice with the orchestra). Already

Wagner was reproached for the "elementary" character of his music, for its

aquaticism, or its "atomization" of the motif, "a subdivision into infinitely

small units." This becomes even clearer if we think of becoming-animal:

birds are still just as important, yet the reign of birds seems to have been

replaced by the age of insects, with its much more molecular vibrations,

chirring, rustling, buzzing, clicking, scratching, and scraping. Birds are

vocal, but insects are instrumental: drums and violins, guitars and

cymbals.

101

A becoming-insect has replaced becoming-bird, or forms a

block with it. The insect is closer, better able to make audible the truth that

all becomings are molecular (cf. Martenot's waves, electronic music). The

molecular has the capacity to make the elementary communicate with the
cosmic: precisely

1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 309

because it effects a dissolution of form that connects the most diverse lon-

gitudes and latitudes, the most varied speeds and slownesses, which guar-

antees a continuum by stretching variation far beyond its formal limits.

Rediscover Mozart, and that the "theme" was a variation from the start.

Varese explains that the sound molecule (the block) separates into ele-

ments arranged in different ways according to variable relations of speed,

but also into so many waves or flows of a sonic energy irradiating the entire

universe, a headlong line of flight. That is how he populated the Gobi

desert with insects and stars constituting a becoming-music of the world, or

a diagonal for a cosmos. Messiaen presents multiple chromatic durations

in coalescence, "alternating between the longest and the shortest, in order

to suggest the idea of the relations between the infinitely long durations of

the stars and mountains and the infinitely short ones of the insects and

atoms: a cosmic, elementary power that... derives above all from the labor

of rhythm."

102

The same thing that leads a musician to discover the birds

also leads him to discover the elementary and the cosmic. Both combine to

form a block, a universe fiber, a diagonal or complex space. Music dis-

patches molecular flows. Of course, as Messiaen says, music is not the priv-

ilege of human beings: the universe, the cosmos, is made of refrains; the

question in music is that of a power of deterritorialization permeating

nature, animals, the elements, and deserts as much as human beings. The

question is more what is not musical in human beings, and what already is

musical in nature. Moreover, what Messiaen discovered in music is the

same thing the ethologists discovered in animals: human beings are hardly

at an advantage, except in the means of overcoding, of making punctual

systems. That is even the opposite of having an advantage; through

becomings-woman, -child, -animal, or -molecular, nature opposes its

power, and the power of music, to the machines of human beings, the roar

of factories and bombers. And it is necessary to reach that point, it is neces-

sary for the nonmusical sound of the human being to form a block with the

becoming-music of sound, for them to confront and embrace each other

like two wrestlers who can no longer break free from each other's grasp, and

slide down a sloping line: "Let the choirs represent the survivors. . . Faintly

one hears the sound of cicadas. Then the notes of a lark, followed by the

mockingbird. Someone laughs ... A woman sobs . . . From a male a great

shout:

WE ARE LOST

A woman's voice:

WE ARE SAVED

Staccato cries: Lost!

Saved! Lost! Saved!"

103

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OF THE REFRAIN □ 311

I. A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under
his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients
himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a
calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. Per-
haps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself
is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos
and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment. There is always sonority
in Ariadne's thread. Or the song of Orpheus.

II. Now we are at home. But home does not preexist: it was necessary to

draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile center, to organize a limited
space. Many, very diverse, components have a part in this, landmarks and
marks of all kinds. This was already true of the previous case. But now the
components are used for organizing a space, not for the momentary deter
mination of a center. The forces of chaos are kept outside as much as possi
ble, and the interior space protects the germinal forces of a task to fulfill or
a deed to do. This involves an activity of selection, elimination and extrac
tion, in order to prevent the interior forces of the earth from being sub
merged, to enable them to resist, or even to take something from chaos
across the filter or sieve of the space that has been drawn. Sonorous or vocal
components are very important: a wall of sound, or at least a wall with
some sonic bricks in it. A child hums to summon the strength for the
schoolwork she has to hand in. A housewife sings to herself, or listens to the
radio, as she marshals the antichaos forces of her work. Radios and televi
sion sets are like sound walls around every household and mark territories
(the neighbor complains when it gets too loud). For sublime deeds like the
foundation of a city or the fabrication of a golem, one draws a circle, or bet
ter yet walks in a circle as in a children's dance, combining rhythmic vowels
and consonants that correspond to the interior forces of creation as to the
differentiated parts of an organism. A mistake in speed, rhythm, or har
mony would be catastrophic because it would bring back the forces of
chaos, destroying both creator and creation.

III. Finally, one opens the circle a crack, opens it all the way, lets some

one in, calls someone, or else goes out oneself, launches forth. One opens
the circle not on the side where the old forces of chaos press against it but in
another region, one created by the circle itself. As though the circle tended
on its own to open onto a future, as a function of the working forces it shel
ters. This time, it is in order to join with the forces of the future, cosmic
forces. One launches forth, hazards an improvisation. But to improvise is
to join with the World, or meld with it. One ventures from home on the
thread of a tune. Along sonorous, gestural, motor lines that mark the
customary path of a child and graft themselves onto or begin to bud "lines

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of drift" with different loops, knots, speeds, movements, gestures, and

sonorities.

These are not three successive moments in an evolution. They are three

aspects of a single thing, the Refrain {ritournelle). They are found in tales

(both horror stories and fairy tales), and in lieder as well. The refrain has

all three aspects, it makes them simultaneous or mixes them: sometimes,

sometimes, sometimes. Sometimes chaos is an immense black hole in

which one endeavors to fix a fragile point as a center. Sometimes one

organizes around that point a calm and stable "pace" (rather than a form):

the black hole has become a home. Sometimes one grafts onto that pace a

breakaway from the black hole. Paul Klee presented these three aspects,

and their interlinkage, in a most profound way. He calls the black hole a

"gray point" for pictorial reasons. The gray point starts out as

nonlocal-izable, nondimensional chaos, the force of chaos, a tangled

bundle of aberrant lines. Then the point "jumps over itself and radiates a

dimensional space with horizontal layers, vertical cross sections,

unwritten customary lines, a whole terrestrial interior force (this force also

appears, at a more relaxed pace, in the atmosphere and in water). The gray

point (black hole) has thus jumped from one state to another, and no

longer represents chaos but the abode or home. Finally, the point launches

out of itself, impelled by wandering centrifugal forces that fan out to the

sphere of the cosmos: one "tries convulsively to fly from the earth, but at

the following level one actually rises above it... powered by centrifugal

forces that triumph over gravity."

The role of the refrain has often been emphasized: it is territorial, a terri-

torial assemblage. Bird songs: the bird sings to mark its territory. The

Greek modes and Hindu rhythms are themselves territorial, provincial,

regional. The refrain may assume other functions, amorous, professional

or social, liturgical or cosmic: it always carries earth with it; it has a land

(sometimes a spiritual land) as its concomitant; it has an essential relation

to a Natal, a Native. A musical "nome" is a little tune, a melodic formula

that seeks recognition and remains the bedrock or ground of polyphony
{cantus firmus). The nomos as customary, unwritten law is inseparable

from a distribution of space, a distribution in space. By that token, it is
ethos, but the ethos is also the Abode.

Sometimes one goes from chaos to

the threshold of a territorial assemblage: directional components,

infra-assemblage. Sometimes one organizes the assemblage: dimensional

components, intra-assemblage. Sometimes one leaves the territorial

assemblage for other assemblages, or for somewhere else entirely:

interassem-blage, components of passage or even escape. And all three at

once. Forces of chaos, terrestrial forces, cosmic forces: all of these

confront each other and converge in the territorial refrain.

1837:

OF THE REFRAIN D 313

From chaos, Milieus and Rhythms are born. This is the concern of very

ancient cosmogonies. Chaos is not without its own directional compo-

nents, which are its own ecstasies. We have seen elsewhere how all kinds of

milieus, each defined by a component, slide in relation to one another, over

one another. Every milieu is vibratory, in other words, a block of

space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component. Thus

the living thing has an exterior milieu of materials, an interior milieu of

composing elements and composed substances, an intermediary milieu of

membranes and limits, and an annexed milieu of energy sources and

actions-perceptions. Every milieu is coded, a code being defined by peri-

odic repetition; but each code is in a perpetual state of transcoding or

transduction. Transcoding or transduction is the manner in which one

milieu serves as the basis for another, or conversely is established atop

another milieu, dissipates in it or is constituted in it. The notion of the

milieu is not unitary: not only does the living thing continually pass from

one milieu to another, but the milieus pass into one another, they are essen-

tially communicating. The milieus are open to chaos, which threatens

them with exhaustion or intrusion. Rhythm is the milieus' answer to chaos.

What chaos and rhythm have in common is the in-between—between two

milieus, rhythm-chaos or the chaosmos: "Between night and day, between

that which is constructed and that which grows naturally, between muta-

tions from the inorganic to the organic, from plant to animal, from animal

to humankind, yet without this series constituting a progression ..." In this

in-between, chaos becomes rhythm, not inexorably, but it has a chance to.

Chaos is not the opposite of rhythm, but the milieu of all milieus. There is

rhythm whenever there is a transcoded passage from one milieu to

another, a communication of milieus, coordination between heterogene-

ous space-times. Drying up, death, intrusion have rhythm. It is well known

that rhythm is not meter or cadence, even irregular meter or cadence: there

is nothing less rhythmic than a military march. The tom-tom is not 1 -2, the

waltz is not 1, 2, 3, music is not binary or ternary, but rather forty-seven

basic meters, as in Turkish music. Meter, whether regular or not, assumes a

coded form whose unit of measure may vary, but in a noncommunicating

milieu, whereas rhythm is the Unequal or the Incommensurable that is

always undergoing transcoding. Meter is dogmatic, but rhythm is critical;

it ties together critical moments, or ties itself together in passing from one

milieu to another. It does not operate in a homogeneous space-time, but by

heterogeneous blocks. It changes direction. Bachelard is right to say that
"the link between truly active moments (rhythm) is always effected on a dif-
ferent plane from the one upon which the action is carried out."

Rhythm is

never on the same plane as that which has rhythm. Action occurs in a

milieu, whereas rhythm is located between two milieus, or between two

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intermilieus, on the fence, between night and day, at dusk, twilight or
Zwielicht, Haecceity. To change milieus, taking them as you find them:

Such is rhythm. Landing, splashdown, takeoff.. . This easily avoids an

aporia that threatened to introduce meter into rhythm, despite all the dec-

larations of intent to the contrary: How can one proclaim the constituent

inequality of rhythm while at the same time admitting implied vibrations,

periodic repetitions of components? A milieu does in fact exist by virtue of

a periodic repetition, but one whose only effect is to produce a difference

by which the milieu passes into another milieu. It is the difference that is

rhythmic, not the repetition, which nevertheless produces it: productive

repetition has nothing to do with reproductive meter. This is the "critical

solution of the antinomy."

One case of transcoding is particularly important: when a code is not

content to take or receive components that are coded differently, and

instead takes or receives fragments of a different code as such. The first

case pertains to the leaf-water relation, the second to the spider-fly rela-

tion. It has often been noted that the spider web implies that there are

sequences of the fly's own code in the spider's code; it is as though the spi-

der had a fly in its head, a fly "motif," a fly "refrain." The implication may

be reciprocal, as with the wasp and the orchid, or the snapdragon and the

bumblebee. Jakob von Uexkiill has elaborated an admirable theory of

transcodings. He sees the components as melodies in counterpoint, each of

which serves as a motif for another: Nature as music.

Whenever there is

transcoding, we can be sure that there is not a simple addition, but the con-

stitution of a new plane, as of a surplus value. A melodic or rhythmic plane,

surplus value of passage or bridging. The two cases, however, are never

pure; they are in reality mixed (for example, the relation of the leaf, this

time not to water in general but to rain).

Still, we do not yet have a Territory, which is not a milieu, not even an

additional milieu, nor a rhythm or passage between milieus. The territory

is in fact an act that affects milieus and rhythms, that "territorializes"

them. The territory is the product of a territorialization of milieus and

rhythms. It amounts to the same thing to ask when milieus and rhythms

become territorialized, and what the difference is between a nonterritorial

animal and a territorial animal. A territory borrows from all the milieus; it

bites into them, seizes them bodily (although it remains vulnerable to

intrusions). It is built from aspects or portions of milieus. It itself has an

exterior milieu, an interior milieu, an intermediary milieu, and an

annexed milieu. It has the interior zone of a residence or shelter, the exte-

rior zone of its domain, more or less retractable limits or membranes,

intermediary or even neutralized zones, and energy reserves or annexes. It

is by essence marked by "indexes," which may be components taken from

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OF THE REFRAIN D 315

any of the milieus: materials, organic products, skin or membrane states,

energy sources, action-perception condensates. There is a territory pre-

cisely when milieu components cease to be directional, becoming dimen-

sional instead, when they cease to be functional to become expressive.

There is a territory when the rhythm has expressiveness. What defines the

territory is the emergence of matters of expression (qualities). Take the

example of color in birds or fish: color is a membrane state associated with

interior hormonal states, but it remains functional and transitory as long as

it is tied to a type of action (sexuality, aggressiveness, flight). It becomes

expressive, on the other hand, when it acquires a temporal constancy and a

spatial range that make it a territorial, or rather territorializing, mark: a sig-

nature.

The question is not whether color resumes its functions or fulfills

new ones in the territory. It is clear that it does, but this reorganization of

functions implies first of all that the component under consideration has

become expressive and that its meaning, from this standpoint, is to mark a

territory. The same species of birds may have colored and uncolored repre-

sentatives; the colored birds have a territory, whereas the all-white ones are

gregarious. We know what role urine and excrement play in marking, but

territorial excrement, for example, in the rabbit, has a particular odor

owing to specialized anal glands. Many monkeys, when serving as guards,

expose their brightly colored sexual organs: the penis becomes a rhythmic

and expressive color-carrier that marks the limits of the territory.

A milieu

component becomes both a quality and a property, quale and proprium. It

has been remarked how quick this becoming is in many cases, the rapidity

with which a territory is constituted at the same time as expressive quali-

ties are selected or produced. The brown stagemaker {Scenopoeetes
dentirostris) lays down landmarks each morning by dropping leaves it picks

from its tree, and then turning them upside down so the paler underside

stands out against the dirt: inversion produces a matter of expression.

The territory is not primary in relation to the qualitative mark; it is the

mark that makes the territory. Functions in a territory are not primary;

they presuppose a territory-producing expressiveness. In this sense, the

territory, and the functions performed within it, are products of

territorialization. Territorialization is an act of rhythm that has become

expressive, or of milieu components that have become qualitative. The

marking of a territory is dimensional, but it is not a meter, it is a rhythm. It

retains the most general characteristic of rhythm, which is to be inscribed

on a different plane than that of its actions. But now the distinction

between the two planes is between territorializing expressions and

territorialized functions. That is why we cannot accept a thesis like

Lorenz's, which tends to make aggressiveness the basis of the territory: the

territory would then be the product of the phylogenetic evolution of an

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instinct of aggression, starting at the point where that instinct became

intraspecific, was turned against the animal's own kind. A territorial ani-

mal would direct its aggressiveness against members of its own species; the

species would gain the selective advantage of distributing its members

throughout a space where each would have its own place.

This ambiguous

thesis, which has dangerous political overtones, seems to us to have little

foundation. It is obvious that the function of aggression changes pace when

it becomes intraspecific. but this reorganization of the function, rather

than explaining the territory, presupposes it. there are numerous reorgani-

zations within the territory, which also affect sexuality, hunting, etc.; there

are even new functions, such as building a place to live. These functions are

organized or created only because they are territorialized, and not the other

way around. The T factor, the territorializing factor, must be sought

elsewhere: precisely in the becoming-expressive of rhythm or melody, in

other words, in the emergence or proper qualities (color, odor, sound,

silhouette...).

Can this becoming, this emergence, be called Art? That would make the

territory a result of art. The artist: the first person to set out a boundary

stone, or to make a mark. Property, collective or individual, is derived from

that even when it is in the service of war and oppression. Property is funda-

mentally artistic because art is fundamentally poster, placard. As Lorenz

says, coral fish are posters. The expressive is primary in relation to the pos-

sessive; expressive qualities, or matters of expression, are necessarily

appropriative and constitute a having more profound than being.

Not in

the sense that these qualities belong to a subject, but in the sense that they

delineate a territory that will belong to the subject that carries or produces

them. These qualities are signatures, but the signature, the proper name, is

not the constituted mark of a subject, but the constituting mark of a

domain, an abode. The signature is not the indication of a person; it is the

chancy formation of a domain. Abodes have proper names, and are

inspired. "The inspired and their abodes . . ."; it is with the abode that

inspiration arises. No sooner do I like a color that I make it my standard or

placard. One puts one's signature on something just as one plants one's flag

on a piece of land. A high school supervisor stamped all the leaves strewn

about the school yard and then put them back in their places. He had

signed. Territorial marks are readymades. And what is called art brut in not

at all pathological or primitive; it is merely this constitution, this freeing, of

matters of expression in the movement of territoriality: the base or ground

of art. Take anything and make it a matter of expression. The stagemaker

practices art brut. Artists are stagemakers, even when they tear up their

own posters. Of course, from this standpoint art is not the privilege of

human beings. Messiaen is right in saying that many birds are not only vir-

1837:

OF THE REFRAIN □ 317

tuosos but artists, above all in their territorial songs (if a robber "improp-

erly wishes to occupy a spot which doesn't belong to it, the true owner sings

and sings so well that the predator goes away.... If the robber sings better

than the true proprietor, the proprietor yields his place").

The refrain is

rhythm and melody that have been territorialized because they have

become expressive—and have become expressive because they are

territorializing. We are not going in circles. What we wish to say is that

there is a self-movement of expressive qualities. Expressiveness is not

reducible to the immediate effects of an impulse triggering an action in a

milieu: effects of that kind are subjective impressions or emotions rather

than expressions (as, for example, the temporary color a freshwater fish

takes on under a given impulse). On the other hand, expressive qualities,

the colors of the coral fish, for example, are auto-objective, in other words,

find an objectivity in the territory they draw.

What is this objective movement? What does a matter do as a matter of

expression? It is first of all a poster or placard, but that is not all it is. It

merely takes that route. The signature becomes style. In effect, expressive
qualities or matters of expression enter shifting relations with one another
that "express" the relation of the territory they draw to the interior milieu of
impulses and exterior milieu of circumstances. To express is not to depend

upon; there is an autonomy of expression. On the one hand, expressive

qualities entertain internal relations with one another that constitute terri-
torial motifs; sometimes these motifs loom above the internal impulses,

sometimes they are superposed upon them, sometimes they ground one

impulse in another, sometimes they pass and cause a passage from one

impulse to another, sometimes they insert themselves between them—but

they are not themselves "pulsed." Sometimes these nonpulsed motifs arise

in a fixed form, or seem to arise that way, but at other times the same ones,

or others, take on variable speed and articulation; it is as much their varia-

bility as their fixity that makes them independent of the drives they com-

bine or neutralize. "We know that our dogs go through motions of smelling,

seeking, chasing, biting, and shaking to death with equal enthusiasm

whether they are hungry or not."

Another example is the dance of the

stickleback. Its zigzag is a motif in which the zig is tied to an aggressive

drive toward the partner, and the zag to a sexual drive toward the nest; yet

the zig and the zag are accented, or even oriented, differently. On the other

hand, expressive qualities also entertain other internal relations that pro-

duce territorial counterpoints: this refers to the manner in which they con-

stitute points in the territory that place the circumstances of the external

milieu in counterpoint. For example, an enemy approaches or suddenly

appears, or rain starts to fall, the sun rises, the sun sets... Here again, the

points or counterpoints are autonomous in their fixity or variability in

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relation to the circumstances of the exterior milieu whose relation to the

territory they express. For this relation can be given without the circum-

stances being given, just as the relation to the impulses can be given with-

out the impulse being given. And even when the impulses and circum-

stances are given, the relation is prior to what it places in relation.

Relations between matters of expression express relations of the territory

to internal impulses and external circumstances: they have an autonomy

within this very expression. In truth, territorial motifs and counterpoints

explore potentialities of the interior or exterior milieu. Ethologists have

grouped these phenomena under the concept of "ritualization" and have

demonstrated the link between animal rituals and territory. But this word

is not necessarily appropriate for these nonpulsed motifs and nonlocalized

counterpoints, since it accounts for neither their variability nor their fixity.

It is not one or the other, fixity or variability; certain motifs or points are

fixed only if others are variable, or else they are fixed on one occasion and

variable on another.

We should say, rather, that territorial motifs form rhythmic faces or char-

acters, and that territorial counterpoints form melodic landscapes. There is

a rhythmic character when we find that we no longer have the simple situa-

tion of a rhythm associated with a character, subject, or impulse. The

rhythm itself is now the character in its entirety; as such, it may remain con-

stant, or it may be augmented or diminished by the addition or subtraction

of sounds or always increasing or decreasing durations, and by an amplifi-

cation or elimination bringing death or resuscitation, appearance or disap-

pearance. Similarly, the melodic landscape is no longer a melody associ-

ated with a landscape; the melody itself is a sonorous landscape in

counterpoint to a virtual landscape. That is how we get beyond the placard

stage: although each expressive quality, each matter of expression consid-

ered in itself, is a placard or poster, the analysis of them is nevertheless

abstract. Expressive qualities entertain variable or constant relations with

one another (that is what matters of expression do); they no longer consti-

tute placards that mark a territory, but motifs and counterpoints that

express the relation of the territory to interior impulses or exterior circum-

stances, whether or not they are given. No longer signatures, but a style.

What objectively distinguishes a musician bird from a nonmusician bird is

precisely this aptitude for motifs and counterpoints that, if they are varia-

ble, or even when they are constant, make matters of expression something

other than a poster—a style—since they articulate rhythm and harmonize

melody. We can then say that the musician bird goes from sadness to joy or

that it greets the rising sun or endangers itself in order to sing or sings better

than another, etc. None of these formulations carries the slightest risk of

anthropomorphism, or implies the slightest interpretation. It is instead a

1837:

OF THE REFRAIN D 319

kind of geomorphism. The relation to joy and sadness, the sun, danger, per-

fection, is given in the motif and counterpoint, even if the term of each of

these relations is not given. In the motif and the counterpoint, the sun, joy

or sadness, danger, become sonorous, rhythmic, or melodic.

Human music also goes this route. For Swann, the art lover, Vinteuil's

little phrase often acts as a placard associated with the Bois de Boulogne

and the face and character of Odette: as if it reassured Swann that the Bois

de Boulogne was indeed his territory, and Odette his possession. There is

already something quite artistic in this way of hearing music. Debussy crit-

icized Wagner, comparing his leitmotifs to signposts signaling the hidden

circumstances of a situation, the secret impulses of a character. The criti-

cism is accurate, on one level or at certain moments. But as the work devel-

ops, the motifs increasingly enter into conjunction, conquer their own
plane, become autonomous from the dramatic action, impulses, and situa-

tions, and independent of characters and landscapes; they themselves

become melodic landscapes and rhythmic characters continually enrich-

ing their internal relations. They may then remain relatively constant, or

on the contrary grow or diminish, expand or contract, vary in the speed at

which they unfold: in both cases, they are no longer pulsed and localized,

and even the constants are in the service of variation; the more provisory

they are, the more they display the continuous variation they resist, the

more rigid they become.

Proust was among the first to underscore this life

of the Wagnerian motif. Instead of the motif being tied to a character who

appears, the appearance of the motif itself constitutes a rhythmic character

in "the plenitude of a music that is indeed filled with so many strains, each

of which is a being."

It is not by chance that the apprenticeship of the

Recherche pursues an analogous discovery in relation to Vinteuil's little

phrases: they do not refer to a landscape; they carry and develop within

themselves landscapes that do not exist on the outside (the white sonata

and red septet. ..). The discovery of the properly melodic landscape and

the properly rhythmic character marks the moment of art when it ceases to

be a silent painting on a signboard. This may not be art's last word, but art

went that route, as did the bird: motifs and counterpoints that form an

autodevelopment, in other words, a style. The interiorization of the

melodic or sonorous landscape finds its exemplary form in Liszt and that

of the rhythmic character in Wagner. More generally, the lied is the musical

art of the landscape, the most pictorial, impressionist form of music. But

the two poles are so closely bound that in the lied as well Nature appears as

a rhythmic character with infinite transformations.

The territory is first of all the critical distance between two beings of the

same species: Mark your distance. What is mine is first of all my distance; I

possess only distances. Don't anybody touch me, I growl if anyone enters

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my territory, I put up placards. Critical distance is a relation based on mat-

ters of expression. It is a question of keeping at a distance the forces of

chaos knocking at the door. Mannerism: the ethos is both abode and man-

ner, homeland and style. This is evident in territorial dances termed

baroque or mannerist, in which each pose, each movement, establishes a

distance of this kind (sarabands, allemandes, bourrees, gavottes.. .).

There is a whole art of poses, postures, silhouettes, steps, and voices. Two

schizophrenics converse or stroll according to laws of boundary and terri-

tory that may escape us. How very important it is, when chaos threatens, to

draw an inflatable, portable territory. If need be, I'll put my territory on my

own body, I'll territorialize my body: the house of the tortoise, the hermit-

age of the crab, but also tattoos that make the body a territory. Critical dis-

tance is not a meter, it is a rhythm. But the rhythm, precisely, is caught up in

a becoming that sweeps up the distances between characters, making them

rhythmic characters that are themselves more or less distant, more or less

combinable (intervals). Two animals of the same sex and species confront

each other: the rhythm of the first one "expands" when it approaches its

territory or the center of its territory; the rhythm of the second contracts

when it moves away from its territory. Between the two, at the boundaries,

an oscillational constant is established: an active rhythm, a passively

endured rhythm, and a witness rhythm?

Or else the animal opens its terri-

tory a crack for a partner of the opposite sex: a complex rhythmic character

forms through duets, antiphonal or alternating singing, as in the case of

African shrikes. Furthermore, we must simultaneously take into account

two aspects of the territory: it not only ensures and regulates the coexis-

tence of members of the same species by keeping them apart, but makes

possible the coexistence of a maximum number of different species in the

same milieu by specializing them. Members of the same species enter into

rhythmic characters at the same time as different species enter into

melodic landscapes; for the landscapes are peopled by characters and the

characters belong to landscapes. An example is Messiaen's
Chrono-chromie, with its eighteen bird songs forming autonomous

rhythmic characters and simultaneously realizing an extraordinary

landscape in complex counterpoint, with invented or implicit chords.

Not only does art not wait for human beings to begin, but we may ask if

art ever appears among human beings, except under artificial and belated

conditions. It has often been noted that human art was for a long time

bound up with work and rites of a different nature. Saying this, however,

perhaps has no more weight than saying that art begins with human beings.

For it is true that a territory has two notable effects: a reorganization of
functions and a regrouping of forces. On the one hand, when functional

activities are territorialized they necessarily change pace (the creation of

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OF THE REFRAIN □ 321

new functions such as building a dwelling, or the transformation of old

functions, as when aggressiveness changes nature and becomes

intra-specific). This is like a nascent theme of specialization or

professionalism: if the territorial refrain so often passes into professional

refrains, it is because professions assume that various activities are

performed in the same milieu, and that the same activity has no other

agents in the same territory. Professional refrains intersect in the milieu,

like merchants' cries, but each marks a territory within which the same

activity cannot be performed, nor the same cry ring out. In animals as in

human beings, there are rules of critical distance for competition: my stretch

of sidewalk. In short, a territorialization of functions is the condition for

their emergence as "occupations" or "trades." Thus intraspecific or

specialized aggressiveness is necessarily a territorialized aggressiveness;

it does not explain the territory since it itself derives from it. It is

immediately apparent that all activities within the territory adopt a new

practical pace. But that is no reason to conclude that art in itself does not

exist here, for it is present in the territorializing factor that is the

necessary condition for the emergence of the work-function.

The situation is the same if we consider the other effect of territori-

alization. That other effect, which relates not to occupations but to rites

and religions, consists in this: the territory groups all the forces of the dif-

ferent milieus together in a single sheaf constituted by the forces of the

earth. The attribution of all the diffuse forces to the earth as receptacle or

base takes place only at the deepest level of each territory. "The surround-

ing milieu was experienced as a unity; it is very hard to distinguish in these

primal intuitions what belongs properly to the earth from what is merely

manifested through the earth: mountains, forests, water, vegetation."

The forces of air and water, bird and fish, thus become forces of the earth.

Moreover, although in extension the territory separates the interior forces

of the earth from the exterior forces of chaos, the same does not occur in

"intension," in the dimension of depth, where the two types of force clasp

and are wed in a battle whose only criterion and stakes is the earth. There is

always a place, a tree or grove, in the territory where all the forces come

together in a hand-to-hand combat of energies. The earth is this close

embrace.

This intense center is simultaneously inside the territory, and

outside several territories that converge on it at the end of an immense pil-

grimage (hence the ambiguities of the "natal"). Inside or out, the territory

is linked to this intense center, which is like the unknown homeland, terres-

trial source of all forces friendly and hostile, where everything is decided.

So we must once again acknowledge that religion, which is common to

human beings and animals, occupies territory only because it depends on

the raw aesthetic and territorializing factor as its necessary condition. It is

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this factor that at the same time organizes the functions of the milieu into

occupations and binds the forces of chaos in rites and religions, which are

forces of the earth. Territorializing marks simultaneously develop into
motifs and counterpoints, and reorganize functions and regroup forces. But

by virtue of this, the territory already unleashes something that will surpass

it.

We always come back to this "moment": the becoming-expressive of

rhythm, the emergence of expressive proper qualities, the formation of

matters of expression that develop into motifs and counterpoints. We

therefore need a notion, even an apparently negative one, that can grasp

this fictional or raw moment. The essential thing is the disjunction notice-

able between the code and the territory. The territory arises in a free margin

of the code, one that is not indeterminate but rather is determined differ-

ently. Each milieu has its own code, and there is perpetual transcoding

between milieus; the territory, on the other hand, seems to form at the level

of a certain decoding. Biologists have stressed the importance of these

determined margins, which are not to be confused with mutations, in other

words, changes internal to the code: here, it is a question of duplicated

genes or extra chromosomes that are not inside the genetic code, are free of

function, and offer a free matter for variation.

But it is very unlikely that

this kind of matter could create new species independently of mutations,

unless it were accompanied by events of another order capable of multiply-

ing the interactions of the organism with its milieus. Territorialization is

precisely such a factor that lodges on the margins of the code of a single spe-

cies and gives the separate representatives of that species the possibility of

differentiating. It is because there is a disjunction between the territory

and the code that the territory can indirectly induce new species. Wherever

territoriality appears, it establishes an intraspecific critical distance

between members of the same species; it is by virtue of its own disjunction

in relation to specific differences that it becomes an oblique, indirect means

of differentiation. From all of these standpoints, decoding appears as the

"negative" of the territory, and the most obvious distinction between terri-

torial animals and nonterritorial animals is that the former are much less

coded than the latter. We have said enough bad things about the territory

that we can now evaluate all the creations that tend toward it, occur within

it, and result or will result from it.

We have gone from forces of chaos to forces of the earth. From milieus to

territory. From functional rhythms to the becoming-expressive of rhythm.

From phenomena of transcoding to phenomena of decoding. From milieu

functions to territorialized functions. It is less a question of evolution than

of passage, bridges and tunnels. We saw that milieus continually pass into

one another. Now we see that the milieus pass into the territory. The

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OF THE REFRAIN D 323

expressive qualities we term aesthetic are certainly not "pure" or symbolic

qualities but proper qualities, in other words, appropriative qualities, pas-

sages from milieu components to territory components. The territory itself

is a place of passage. The territory is the first assemblage, the first thing to

constitute an assemblage; the assemblage is fundamentally territorial. But

how could it not already be in the process of passing into something else,

into other assemblages? That is why we could not talk about the constitu-

tion of the territory without also talking about its internal organization.

We could not describe the infra-assemblage (posters or placards) without

also discussing the intra-assemblage (motifs and counterpoints). Nor can

we say anything about the intra-assemblage without already being on the

path to other assemblages, or elsewhere. The passage of the Refrain. The

refrain moves in the direction of the territorial assemblage and lodges itself

there or leaves. In a general sense, we call a refrain any aggregate of matters
of expression that draws a territory and develops into territorial motifs and
landscapes (there are optical, gestural, motor, etc., refrains). In the narrow

sense, we speak of a refrain when an assemblage is sonorous or "domi-

nated" by sound—but why do we assign this apparent privilege to sound?

We are now in the intra-assemblage. Its organization is very rich and

complex. It includes not only the territorial assemblage but also assem-

bled, territorialized functions. Take the Troglodytidae, the wren family:

the male takes possession of his territory and produces a "music box

refrain" as a warning to possible intruders; he builds his own nests in his

territory, sometimes as many as a dozen; when a female arrives, he sits in

front of a nest, invites her to visit, hangs his wings, and lowers the inten-

sity of his song, reduced to a mere trill.

It seems that the nesting function

is highly territorialized, since the nests are prepared by the male alone

before the arrival of the female, who only visits and completes them; the

"courtship" function is also territorialized, but to a lesser degree, since

the territorial refrain becomes seductive by changing in intensity. All

kinds of heterogeneous elements show up in the intra-assemblage: not

only the assemblage marks that group materials, colors, odors, sounds,

postures, etc., but also the various elements of given assembled behaviors

that enter into a motif. For example, a display behavior is composed of a

dance, clicking of the beak, an exhibition of colors, a posture with neck

outstretched, cries, smoothing of the feathers, bows, a refrain. .. The first

question to be asked is what holds these territorializing marks, territorial

motifs, and territorialized functions together in the same intra-assem-

blage. This is a question of consistency: the "holding together" of hetero-

geneous elements. At first, they constitute no more than a fuzzy set, a

discrete set that later takes on consistency.

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But another question seems to interrupt or cut across the first one. For

in many cases, a territorialized, assembled function acquires enough

independence to constitute a new assemblage, one that is more or less

deterritorialized, en route to deterritorialization. There is no need to

effectively leave the territory to go this route; but what just a minute ago

was a constituted function in the territorial assemblage has become the

constituting element of another assemblage, the element of passage to

another assemblage. As in courtly love, a color ceases to be territorial and

enters a "courtship" assemblage. The territorial assemblage opens onto

the courtship assemblage, which is a social assemblage that has gained

autonomy. That is what happens when it is specifically the sexual partner

or the members of a group that are recognized, rather than the territory:

The partner is then said to be a Tier mit der Heimvalenz, "an animal with

home value." There is therefore a distinction to be made between milieu

groups and couples (without individual recognition), territorial groups

and couples (in which there is only recognition inside the territory), and

finally social groups and love couples (when there is recognition indepen-

dent of place).

Courtship, or the group, is no longer a part of the territorial

assemblage; a courtship or group assemblage takes on autonomy— even

though it may stay inside the territory. Conversely, in the new assemblage

there is a reterritorialization on the member of the couple or members of

the group that have-the-value-of (valence). This opening of the

assemblage onto other assemblages can be analyzed in detail, and varies

widely. For example, when the male does not make the nest and confines

himself to transporting materials or mimicking the construction of a nest

(as in Australian grass finches), he either courts the female holding a

piece of stubble in his beak (genus Bathilda), uses the grass stem only in

the initial stages of courtship or even beforehand (genera Aidemosyne and
Lonchura), or pecks at the grass without offering it (genus Emblema).

could always be said that these "grass stem" behaviors are merely archa-

isms, or vestiges of nesting behavior. But the notion of behavior itself

proves inadequate to this assemblage. For when the nest is no longer made

by the male, nesting ceases to be a component of the territorial

assemblage—it takes wing, so to speak, from the territory; furthermore,

courtship, which now precedes nesting, itself becomes a relatively autono-

mous assemblage. In addition, the matter of expression, "grass stem," acts

as a component of passage between the territorial assemblage and the

courtship assemblage. The fact that the grass stem has an increasingly

rudimentary function in certain species, the fact that it tends to cancel out

in the series under consideration, is not enough to make it a vestige, much

less a symbol. A matter of expression is never a vestige or a symbol. The

grass stem is a deterritorialized component, or one en route to

1837:

OF THE REFRAIN □ 325

deterritorialization. It is neither an archaism nor a transitional or

part-object. It is an operator, a vector. It is an assemblage converter. The

stem cancels out precisely because it is a component of passage from one

assemblage to another. This viewpoint is confirmed by the fact that if the

stem cancels out, another relay component replaces it or assumes greater

importance, namely, the refrain, which is not only territorial but becomes

amorous and social, and changes accordingly.

The question of why, in the

constitution of new assemblages, the sound component "refrain" has a

stronger valence than the gestural component "grass stem" can be consid-

ered only later on. The important thing for now is to note this formation of

new assemblages within the territorial assemblage, and this movement

from the intra-assemblage to interassemblages by means of components of

passage and relay: An innovative opening of the territory onto the female,

or the group. Selective pressure proceeds by way of interassemblages. It is

as though forces of deterritorialization affected the territory itself, causing

us to pass from the territorial assemblage to other types of assemblages

(courtship or sexuality assemblages, group or social assemblages). The

grass stem and the refrain are two agents of these forces, two agents of

deterritorialization.

The territorial assemblage continually passes into other assemblages.

Likewise, the infra-assemblage is inseparable from the intra-assemblage,

as is the intra-assemblage from interassemblages; yet these passages are

not necessary but rather take place "on a case-by-case basis." The reason

is simple: the intra-assemblage, the territorial assemblage, territorializes func-

tions and forces (sexuality, aggressiveness, gregariousness, etc.), and in

the process of territorializing them, transforms them. But these

territorialized functions and forces can suddenly take on an autonomy

that makes them swing over into other assemblages, compose other

deterritorialized assemblages. In the intra-assemblage, sexuality may

appear as a territorialized function, but it can just as easily draw a line of

deterritorialization that describes another assemblage; there are therefore

quite variable relations between sexuality and the territory, as if sexuality

were keeping "its distance." Profession, trade, and specialty imply

territorialized activities, but they can also take wing from the territory,

building a new assemblage around themselves, and between professions.

A territorial or territorialized component may set about budding, pro-

ducing: this is the case for the refrain, so much so that we should perhaps

call all cases of this kind refrains. This ambiguity between the territory

and deterritorialization is the ambiguity of the Natal. It is understood

much more clearly if it is borne in mind that the territory has an intense

center at its profoundest depths; but as we have seen, this intense center

can be located outside the territory, at the point of convergence of very

326 D

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different and very distant territories. The Natal is outside. We may cite a

certain number of troubling and well-known, more or less mysterious,

cases illustrating prodigious takeoffs from the territory, displaying a vast

movement of deterritorialization directly plugged into the territories and

permeating them through and through: (1) pilgrimages to the source, as

among salmon; (2) supernumerary assemblies, such as those of locusts or

chaffinches, etc. (tens of millions of chaffinches near Thoune in

1950-1951); (3) magnetic or solar-guided migrations; (4) long marches,

such as those of the lobsters.

Whatever the causes of each of these movements, it is clear that the

nature of the movement is different. It is no longer adequate to say that

there is interassemblage, passage from a territorial assemblage to another

type of assemblage; rather, we should say that one leaves all assemblages

behind, that one exceeds the capacities of any possible assemblage, enter-

ing another plane. In effect, there is no longer a milieu movement or

rhythm, nor a territorialized or territorializing movement or rhythm; there

is something of the Cosmos in these more ample movements. The localiza-

tion mechanisms are still extremely precise, but the localization has

become cosmic. These are no longer territorialized forces bundled together

as forces of the earth; they are the liberated or regained forces of a

deterritorialized Cosmos. In migration, the sun is no longer the terrestrial

sun reigning over a territory, even an aerial one; it is the celestial sun of the

Cosmos, as in the two Jerusalems, the Apocalypse. Leaving aside these two

grandiose cases where deterritorialization becomes absolute while losing

nothing of its precision (because it weds cosmic variables), we must remark

that the territory is constantly traversed by movements of deterrito-

rialization that are relative and may even occur in place, by which one

passes from the intra-assemblage to interassemblages, without, however,

leaving the territory or issuing from the assemblages in order to wed the

Cosmos. A territory is always en route to an at least potential deterrito-

rialization, even though the new assemblage may operate a

reterritoriali-zation (something that "has-the-value-of' home). We saw that

the territory constituted itself on a margin of decoding affecting the milieu;

we now see that there is a margin of deterritorialization affecting the

territory itself. There is a series of unclaspings. The territory is

inseparable from certain coefficients of deterritorialization (which can be

evaluated in each case) that place the relations of each territorialized

function to the territory in variation, as well as the relations of the

territory to each deterritorialized assemblage. It is the same "thing" that

appears first as a territorialized function taken up in the intra-assemblage,

and again as a deterritorialized or autonomous assemblage, as an

interassemblage.

Refrains could accordingly be classified as follows: (1) territorial

837: OF THE REFRAIN □ 327

refrains that seek, mark, assemble a territory; (2) territorialized function

refrains that assume a special function in the assemblage (the Lullaby that

territorializes the child's slumber, the Lover's Refrain that territorializes

the sexuality of the loved one, the Professional Refrain that territorializes

trades and occupations, the Merchant Refrain that territorializes distribu-

tion and products); (3) the same, when they mark new assemblages, pass

into new assemblages by means of deterritorialization-reterritorialization

(nursery rhymes are a very complicated example: they are territorial

refrains that are sung differently from neighborhood to neighborhood,

sometimes from one street to the next; they distribute game roles and func-

tions within the territorial assemblage; but they also cause the territory to

pass into the game assemblage, which tends to become autonomous);

(4)

refrains that collect or gather forces, either at the heart of the territory, or in

order to go outside it (these are refrains of confrontation or departure that

sometimes bring on a movement of absolute deterritorialization:

"Goodbye, I'm leaving and I won't look back." At infinity, these refrains

must rejoin the songs of the Molecules, the newborn wailing of the funda-

mental Elements, as Millikan put it. They cease to be terrestrial, becoming

cosmic: when the religious Nome blooms and dissolves in a molecular pan-

theist Cosmos, when the singing of the birds is replaced by combinations of

water, wind, clouds, and fog. "Outside, the wind and the rain ..." The Cos-

mos as an immense deterritorialized refrain).

The problem of consistency concerns the manner in which the compo-

nents of a territorial assemblage hold together. But it also concerns the

manner in which different assemblages hold together, with components of

passage and relay. It may even be the case that consistency finds the totality

of its conditions only on a properly cosmic plane, where all the disparate

and heterogeneous elements are convoked. However, from the moment

heterogeneities hold together in an assemblage or interassemblages a prob-

lem of consistency is posed, in terms of coexistence or succession, and both

simultaneously. Even in a territorial assemblage, it may be the most deter-

ritorialized component, the deterritorializing vector, in other words, the

refrain, that assures the consistency of the territory. If we ask the general

question, "What holds things together?", the clearest, easiest answer seems

to be provided by a formalizing, linear, hierarchized, centralized
arborescent model. Take Tinbergen's schema, which presents a coded link-

age of spatiotemporal forms in the central nervous system: a higher func-

tional center goes automatically into operation and releases an appetitive

behavior in search of specific stimuli (the migrational center); through the

intermediary of the stimulus, a second center that had been inhibited up to

this point is freed and releases a new appetitive behavior (the territorial

center); then other subordinate centers are activated, centers of fighting,

328 □ 1837: OF THE REFRAIN

nesting, courtship . . . until stimuli are found that release the correspond-

ing executive acts.

This kind of representation, however, is constructed of

oversimplified binarities: inhibition-release, innate-acquired, etc.

Etholo-gists have a great advantage over ethnologists: they did not fall

into the structural danger of dividing an undivided "terrain" into forms of

kinship, politics, economics, myth, etc. The ethologists have retained the

integrality of a certain undivided "terrain." But by orienting it along the

axes of inhibition-release, innate-acquired, they risk reintroducing souls

and centers at each locus and stage of linkage. That is why even the

authors who stress the role of the peripheral and the acquired at the level

of releasing stimuli do not truly overturn the linear aborescent schema,

even if they reverse the direction of the arrows.

It seems more important to us to underline a certain number of factors

liable to suggest an entirely different schema, one favoring rhizomatic,

rather than arborified, functioning, and no longer operating by these dual-

isms. First of all, what is called a functional center brings into play not only

a localization but also a distribution of an entire population of neurons

selected from throughout the central nervous system, as in a "cable net-

work." This being the case, in considering the system as a whole we should

speak less of automatism of a higher center than of coordination between

centers, and of the cellular groupings or molecular populations that per-

form these couplings: there is no form or correct structure imposed from

without or above but rather an articulation from within, as if oscillating

molecules, oscillators, passed from one heterogeneous center to another, if

only for the purpose of assuring the dominance of one among them.

This

obviously excludes any linear relation from one center to another, in favor

of packets of relations steered by molecules: the interaction or coordina-

tion may be positive or negative (release or inhibition), but it is never

direct, as in a linear relation or chemical reaction; it always occurs between

molecules with at least two heads, and each center taken separately.

This represents a whole behavioral-biological "machinics," a whole

molecular engineering that should help increase our understanding of the

nature of problems of consistency. The philosopher Eugene Dupreel pro-

posed a theory of consolidation; he demonstrated that life went not from a

center to an exteriority but from an exterior to an interior, or rather from a

discrete or fuzzy aggregate to its consolidation. This implies three things.

First, that there is no beginning from which a linear sequence would derive,

but rather densifications, intensifications, reinforcements, injections,

showerings, like so many intercalary events ("there is growth only by inter-

calation"). Second, and this is not a contradiction, there must be an

arrangement of intervals, a distribution of inequalities, such that it is

sometimes necessary to make a hole in order to consolidate. Third, there is

1837: OF THE REFRAIN D 329

a superposition of disparate rhythms, an articulation from within of an

interrhythmicity, with no imposition of meter or cadence.

Consolidation

is not content to come after; it is creative. The fact is that the beginning

always begins in-between, intermezzo. Consistency is the same as consoli-

dation, it is the act that produces consolidated aggregates, of succession as

well as of coexistence, by means of the three factors just mentioned: inter-

calated elements, intervals, and articulations of superposition. Architec-

ture, as the art of the abode and the territory, attests to this: there are

consolidations that are made afterward, and there are consolidations of the

keystone type that are constituent parts of the ensemble. More recently,

matters like reinforced concrete have made it possible for the architectural

ensemble to free itself from arborescent models employing tree-pillars,

branch-beams, foliage-vaults. Not only is concrete a heterogeneous matter

whose degree of consistency varies according to the elements in the mix,

but iron is intercalated following a rhythm; moreover, its self-supporting
surfaces form a complex rhythmic personage whose "stems" have different

sections and variable intervals depending on the intensity and direction of

the force to be tapped (armature instead of structure). In this sense, the lit-

erary or musical work has an architecture: "Saturate every atom," as Vir-

ginia Woolf said;

or in the words of Henry James, it is necessary to "begin

far away, as far away as possible," and to proceed by "blocks of wrought

matter." It is no longer a question of imposing a form upon a matter but of

elaborating an increasingly rich and consistent material, the better to tap

increasingly intense forces. What makes a material increasingly rich is the

same as what holds heterogeneities together without their ceasing to be het-

erogeneous. What holds them together in this way are intercalary oscilla-

tors, synthesizers with at least two heads; these are interval analyzers,

rhythm synchronizers (the word "synchronizer" is ambiguous because

molecular synchronizers do not proceed by homogenizing and equalizing

measurement, but operate from within, between two rhythms). Is not con-

solidation the terrestrial name for consistency? The territorial assemblage

is a milieu consolidation, a space-time consolidation, of coexistence and

succession. And the refrain operates with these three factors.

The matters of expression themselves must present characteristics mak-

ing this taking on of consistency possible. We have seen that they have an

aptitude to enter into internal relations forming motifs and counterpoints:

the territorializing marks become territorial motifs or counterpoints, the

signatures and placards constitute a "style." These are the elements of a

discrete or fuzzy aggregate; but they become consolidated, take on consis-

tency. To this extent, they have effects, such as reorganizing functions and

gathering forces. To get a better grasp on the mechanism of this aptitude,

we may lay down certain conditions of homogeneity, beginning with marks

330 □

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or matters of the same kind, for example, a set of sonorous marks, the song

of a bird. The song of the chaffinch normally has three distinct phases: the

first has from four to fourteen notes rising in crescendo but decreasing in

frequency; the second has from two to eight notes, lower than the first and

of constant frequency; the third ends with a complex "flourish" or "orna-

ment." From the standpoint of acquisition, this "full song" is preceded by a

"subsong" that under normal conditions already assumes possession of the

general tonal quality, overall duration and content of the stanzas, and even

a tendency to end on a higher note.

But the organization into three stan-

zas, the order of the stanzas, the details and the ornament, are not pregiven;

it is precisely the articulations from within that are missing, the intervals,

the intercalary notes, everything making for motif and counterpoint. The

distinction between subsong and full song could thus be presented as fol-

lows: the subsong as mark or placard, the full song as style or motif, and the

aptitude to pass from one to the other, for one to consolidate itself in the

other. Clearly, artificial isolation will have very different effects depending

on whether it takes place before or after the acquisition of the components

ofthe subsong.

Our present concern, however, is to find out what happens when these

components effectively develop into the motifs and counterpoints of the

full song. We must leave behind the conditions of qualitative homogeneity

we set for ourselves. For as long as we confine ourselves to marks, marks of

one kind coexist with marks of another kind, period: the sounds of an ani-

mal coexist with its colors, gestures, silhouettes; or else the sounds of a

given species coexist with the sounds of other species, perhaps quite differ-

ent but close in space. The organization of qualified marks into motifs and

counterpoints necessarily entails a taking on of consistency, or a capture of

the marks of another quality, a mutual branching of

sounds-colors-gestures, or a capture of sounds from different animal

species, etc. Consistency necessarily occurs between heterogeneities, not

because it is the birth of a differentiation, but because heterogeneities that

were formerly content to coexist or succeed one another become bound up

with one another through the "consolidation" of their coexistence and

succession. The intervals, intercalations, and articulations constitutive of

motifs and counterpoints in the order of an expressive quality also envelop

other qualities of a different order, or qualities of the same order but of

another sex or even another species of animal. A color will "answer to" a

sound. If a quality has motifs and counterpoints, if there are rhythmic

characters and melodic landscapes in a given order, then there is the

constitution of a veritable machinic opera tying together orders, species,

and heterogeneous qualities. What we term machinic is precisely this

synthesis of heterogeneities as such. Inasmuch as these heterogeneities are

matters of expression, we say

1837:

OF THE REFRAIN □ 331

that their synthesis itself, their consistency or capture, forms a properly

machinic "statement" or "enunciation." The varying relations into which

a color, sound, gesture, movement, or position enters in the same species,

and in different species, form so many machinic enunciations.

Let us return to the stagemaker, the magic bird or bird of the opera. He is

not brightly colored (as though there were an inhibition). But his song, his

refrain, can be heard from a great distance (is this a compensation, or on

the contrary the prime factor?). He sings perched on his singing stick, a

vine or branch located just above the display ground he has prepared by

marking it with cut leaves turned upside down to contrast with the color of

the earth. As he sings, he uncovers the yellow root of certain feathers under-

neath his beak: he makes himself visible at the same time as sonorous. His

song forms a varied and complex motif interweaving his own notes and

those of other birds that he imitates in the intervals.

This produces a con-

solidation that "consists" in species-specific sounds, sounds of other spe-

cies, leaf hue, throat color: the stagemaker's machinic statement or

assemblage of enunciation. Many birds "imitate" the songs of other spe-

cies. But imitation may not be the best concept for these phenomena,

which vary according to the assemblage into which they enter. The subsong

contains elements that can enter into melodic and rhythmic organizations

distinct from those of the species under consideration, supplying the full

song with truly alien or added notes. If certain birds such as the chaffinch

seem impervious to imitation, it is because any alien sounds appearing in

their subsong are eliminated from the consistency of the full song. On the

other hand, in cases where added phrases do get included in the full song, it

may be because there is an interspecific assemblage of the parasitism type;

or it may be because the bird's assemblage itself effectuates the counter-

points to its melody. Thorpe is not wrong to say that the problem is one of

the occupation of frequency bands, as with radios (the sound aspect of ter-

ritoriality).

It is less a question of imitating a song than of occupying cor-

responding frequencies; for there may be an advantage in being able to

restrict oneself to a very determinate zone in some circumstances, and in

others to widen or deepen the zone to assure oneself counterpoints and to

invent chords that would otherwise remain diffuse, as, for example, in the

rain forest, which is precisely where the greatest number of "imitative"

birds are found.

From the standpoint of consistency, matters of expression must be con-

sidered not only in relation to their aptitude to form motifs and counter-

points but also in relation to the inhibitors and releasers that act on them,

and the mechanisms of innateness or learning, heredity or acquisition, that

modulate them. Ethology's mistake is to restrict itself to a binary distri-

bution of these factors, even, and especially, when it is thought necessary to

332 □

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take both into account simultaneously, to intermix them at every level of a

"tree of behaviors." Instead, what should be done is to start from a positive

notion capable of accounting for the very particular character the innate

and the acquired assume in the rhizome, and which is like the principle of

their mixture. Such a notion cannot be arrived at in terms of behavior but

rather only in terms of assemblage. Some authors emphasize autonomous

developments encoded in centers (innateness); others emphasize acquired

linkages regulated by peripheral sensations (learning). But Raymond

Ruyer has demonstrated that the animal is instead prey to "musical

rhythms" and "melodic and rhythmic themes" explainable neither as the

encoding of a recorded phonograph disk nor by the movements of per-

formance that effectuate them and adapt them to the circumstances.

The

opposite is even true: the melodic or rhythmic themes precede their per-

formance and recording. What is primary is the consistency of a refrain, a

little tune, either in the form of a mnemic melody that has no need to be

inscribed locally in a center, or in the form of a vague motif with no need to

be pulsed or stimulated. There is perhaps more to be learned from a musi-

cal and poetic notion such as the Natal—in the lied, or in Holderlin or

Thomas Hardy—than from the slightly vapid and foggy categories of the

innate and the acquired. For from the moment there is a territorial assem-

blage, we can say that the innate assumes a very particular figure, since it is

inseparable from a movement of decoding and passes to the margins of the

code, unlike the innate of the interior milieu; acquisition also assumes a

very particular figure, since it is territorialized, in other words, regulated

by matters of expression rather than by stimuli in the exterior milieu. The

natal is the innate, but decoded; and it is the acquired, but territorialized.

The natal is the new figure assumed by the innate and the acquired in the

territorial assemblage. The affect proper to the natal, as heard in the lied: to

be forever lost, or refound, or aspiring to the unknown homeland. In the

natal, the innate tends to be displaced: as Ruyer says, it is in some way prior
to or downstream from the act; it concerns less the act or the behavior than

the matters of expression themselves, the perception that discerns and

selects them, and the gesture that erects them, or itself constitutes them

(that is why there are "critical periods" when the animal valorizes an object

or situation, "is impregnated" by a matter of expression, long before being

able to perform the corresponding act). This is not to say, however, that

behavior is at the mercy of chance learning; for it is predetermined by this

displacement, and finds rules of assemblage in its own territorialization.

The natal, then, consists in a decoding of innateness and a territo-

rialization of learning, one atop the other, one alongside the other. The

natal has a consistency that cannot be explained as a mixture of the innate

and the acquired, because it is instead what accounts for such mixtures in

1837:

OF THE REFRAIN □ 333

territorial assemblage and interassemblages. In short, the notion of behav-

ior proves inadequate, too linear, in comparison with that of the assem-

blage. The natal stretches from what happens in the intra-assemblage all

the way to the center that has been projected outside; it cuts across all the

interassemblages and reaches all the way to the gates of the Cosmos.

The territorial assemblage is inseparable from lines or coefficients of

deterritorialization, passages, and relays toward other assemblages. There

have been many studies on the influence of artificial conditions on bird

song, but the results vary both by species and according to the kind and

timing of the artifice. Many birds are receptive to the songs of other spe-

cies, if they are exposed to them during the critical period, and will repro-

duce the alien songs later on. The chaffinch, however, seems much more

devoted to its own matters of expression and retains an innate sense of its

own tonal quality even if exposed to synthetic sounds. The outcome also

depends on whether the birds are isolated before or after the critical period.

In the first case, chaffinches develop a nearly normal song; in the second,

the subjects in the isolated group (who cannot hear each other) develop an

abnormal, nonspecies-specific song that is nevertheless common to the

group (see Thorpe). In any event, it is necessary to consider the effects of

deterritorialization or denatalization on a given species at a given moment.

Whenever a territorial assemblage is taken up by a movement that

deterritorializes it (whether under so-called natural or artificial condi-

tions), we say that a machine is released. That in fact is the distinction we

would like to propose between machine and assemblage: a machine is like a

set of cutting edges that insert themselves into the assemblage undergoing

deterritorialization, and draw variations and mutations of it. For there are

no mechanical effects; effects are always machinic, in other words, depend

on a machine that is plugged into an assemblage and has been freed

through deterritorialization. What we call machinic statements are

machine effects that define consistency or enter matters of expression.

Effects of this kind can be very diverse but are never symbolic or imagi-

nary; they always have a real value of passage or relay.

As a general rule, a machine plugs into the territorial assemblage of a

species and opens it to other assemblages, causes it to pass through the

interassemblages of that species; for example, the territorial assemblage of

a bird species opens onto interassemblages of courtship and

gregar-iousness, moving in the direction of the partner or "socius." But

the machine may also open the territorial assemblage to interspecific

assemblages, as in the case of birds that adopt alien songs, and most

especially in the case of parasitism.

Or it may go beyond all assemblages

and produce an opening onto the Cosmos. Or, conversely, instead of

opening up the deterritorialized assemblage onto something else, it may

produce an effect

334 □

1837: OF THE REFRAIN

of closure, as if the aggregate had fallen into and continues to spin in a kind

of black hole. This is what happens under conditions of precocious or

extremely sudden deterritorialization, and when specific, interspecific,

and cosmic paths are blocked; the machine then produces "individual"

group effects spinning in circles, as in the case of chaffinches that have been

isolated too early, whose impoverished, simplified song expresses nothing

more than the resonance of the black hole in which they are trapped. It is

important to bring up this "black hole" function again because it can

increase our understanding of phenomena of inhibition, and is in turn

capable of breaking with the overnarrow inhibitor-releaser dualism. We

saw earlier that an interassemblage could include lines of impoverishment

and fixation leading to a black hole but could still perhaps lead into a richer

and more positive line of deterritorialization (for example, the "grass

stem" component among Australian grass finches falls into a black hole

and leads into the "refrain" component).

Thus the black hole is a

machine effect in assemblages and has a complex relation to other effects.

It may be necessary for the release of innovative processes that they first

fall into a catastrophic black hole: stases of inhibition are associated with

the release of crossroads behaviors. On the other hand, when black holes

resonate together or inhibitions conjugate and echo each other, instead of

an opening onto consistency, we see a closure of the assemblage, as though

it were deterritorialized in the void: young chaffinches. Machines are
always singular keys that open or close an assemblage, a territory. More-

over, finding the machine in operation in a given territorial assemblage is

not enough; it is already in operation in the emergence of matters of expres-

sion, in other words, in the constitution of the assemblage and in the vec-

tors of deterritorialization that ply it from the start.

Thus consistency of matters of expression relates, on the one hand, to

their aptitude to form melodic and rhythmic themes and, on the other

hand, to the power of the natal. Finally, there is one other aspect: their very

special relation to the molecular (the machine starts us down this road).

The very words, "matters of expression," imply that expression has a pri-

mary relation to matter. As matters of expression take on consistency they

constitute semiotic systems, but the semiotic components are inseparable

from material components and are in exceptionally close contact with

molecular levels. The whole question is thus whether or not the

molar-molecular relation assumes a new figure here. In general, it has been

possible to distinguish "molar-molecular" combinations that vary greatly

depending on the direction followed. First, individual atoms can enter into

probabilistic or statistical accumulations that tend to efface their individu-

ality; this already happens on the level of the molecule, and then again in

the molar aggregate. But they can become complicated in interactions and

1837:

OF THE REFRAIN D 335

retain their individuality inside the molecule, then in the macromolecule,

etc., setting up direct communications between individuals of different

orders.

Second, it is clear that the distinction to be made is not between

the individual and the statistical. In fact, it is always a question of popula-

tions; statistics concerns individual phenomena, and antistatistical indi-

viduality operates only in relation to molecular populations. The distinc-

tion is between two group movements, as in Alembert's equation, in which

one group tends toward increasingly equilibrated, homogeneous, and

probable states (the divergent wave and the delayed potential), and the

other group tends toward less probable states of concentration (the conver-

gent wave and the anticipated potential).

Third, the intramolecular inter-

nal forces that give an aggregate its molar form can be of two types: they are

either covalent, arborescent, mechanical, linear, localizable relations sub-

ject to chemical conditions of action and reaction or to linked reactions, or

they are indirect, noncovalent, machinic and nonmechanical, superlinear,

nonlocalizable bonds operating by stereospecific discernment or discrimi-
nation, rather than by linkage.

These are different ways of stating the same distinction, which seems

much broader than the one we are looking for: it is, in effect, a distinction

between matter and life, or rather, since there is only one matter, between

two states, two tendencies of atomic matter (for example, there are bonds

that immobilize the linked atoms in relation to one another, and other

bonds that allow free rotation). Stating the distinction in the most general

way, we could say that it is between stratified systems or systems of stratifi-

cation on the one hand, and consistent, self-consistent aggregates on the

other. But the point is that consistency, far from being restricted to com-

plex life forms, fully pertains even to the most elementary atoms and parti-

cles. There is a coded system of stratification whenever, horizontally, there

are linear causalities between elements; and, vertically, hierarchies of order

between groupings; and, holding it all together in depth, a succession of

framing forms, each of which informs a substance and in turn serves as a

substance for another form. These causalities, hierarchies, and framings

constitute a stratum, as well as the passage from one stratum to another,

and the stratified combinations of the molecular and molar. On the other

hand, we may speak of aggregates of consistency when instead of a regu-

lated succession of forms-substances we are presented with consolidations

of very heterogeneous elements, orders that have been short-circuited or

even reverse causalities, and captures between materials and forces of a dif-

ferent nature: as if a machinic phylum, a destratifying transversality, moved

through elements, orders, forms and substances, the molar and the molec-

ular, freeing a matter and tapping forces.

Now if we ask ourselves where life fits into this distinction, we see that it

336 D

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undoubtedly implies a gain in consistency, in other words, a surplus value

(surplus value of destratificatiori). For example, it contains a greater num-

ber of self-consistent aggregates and processes of consolidation and gives

them molar scope. It is destratifying from the outset, since its code is not

distributed throughout the entire stratum but rather occupies an eminently

specialized genetic line. But the question is almost contradictory, because

asking where life fits in amounts to treating it as a particular stratum

having its own order and befitting order, having its own forms and sub-

stances. It is true that it is both at once: a particularly complex system of

stratification and an aggregate of consistency that disrupts orders, forms,

and substances. As we have seen, the living thing performs a transcoding of

milieus that can be considered both to constitute a stratum and to effect

reverse causalities and transversals of destratification. The same question

can be asked when life no longer restricts itself to mixing milieus but

assembles territories as well. The territorial assemblage implies a decoding

and is inseparable from its own deterritorialization (two new types of sur-

plus value). "Ethology" then can be understood as a very privileged molar

domain for demonstrating how the most varied components (biochemical,

behavioral, perceptive, hereditary, acquired, improvised, social, etc.) can

crystallize in assemblages that respect neither the distinction between

orders nor the hierarchy of forms. What holds all the components together

are transversals, and the transversal itself is only a component that has

taken upon itself the specialized vector of deterritorialization. In effect,

what holds an assemblage together is not the play of framing forms or linear

causalities but, actually or potentially, its most deterritorialized compo-

nent, a cutting edge of deterritorialization. An example is the refrain: it is

more deterritorialized than the grass stem, but this does not preclude its

being "determined," in other words, connected to biochemical and molec-

ular components. The assemblage holds by its most deterritorialized com-

ponent, but deterritorialized is not the same as indeterminate (the refrain

may be narrowly connected to the presence of male hormones).

A compo-

nent of this kind entering an assemblage may be among the most highly

determined, even mechanized, of components, but it will still bring "play"

to what it composes; it fosters the entry of new dimensions of the milieus by

releasing processes of discernibility, specialization, contraction, and accel-

eration that open new possibilities, that open the territorial assemblage

onto interassemblages. Back to the stagemaker: one of its acts consists in

discerning and causing to be discerned both sides of the leaf. This act is

connected to the determinism of the "toothed" beak. Assemblages are

defined simultaneously by matters of expression that take on consistency

independently of the form-substance relation; reverse causalities or

"advanced" determinisms, decoded innate functions related to acts ofdis-

1837:

OF THE REFRAIN □ 337

cernment or election rather than to linked reactions; and molecular combi-
nations that proceed by noncovalent bonding rather than by linear

relations—in short, a new "pace" produced by the imbrication of the
semiotic and the material. From this standpoint, we may oppose the con-

sistency of assemblages to the stratification of milieus. But once again, this

opposition is only relative, entirely relative. Just as milieus swing between

a stratum state and a movement of destratification, assemblages swing

between a territorial closure that tends to restratify them and a

deterrito-rializing movement that on the contrary connects them with the

Cosmos. Thus it is not surprising that the distinction we were seeking

was not between assemblages and something else but between the two

limits of any possible assemblage, in other words, between the system of

strata and the plane of consistency. We should not forget that the strata

rigidify and are organized on the plane of consistency, and that the plane

of consistency is at work and is constructed in the strata, in both cases

piece by piece, blow by blow, operation by operation.

We have gone from stratified milieus to territorialized assemblages and

simultaneously, from the forces of chaos, as broken down, coded,

trans-coded by the milieus, to the forces of the earth, as gathered into the

assemblages. Then we went from territorial assemblages to

interassemblages, to' the opening of assemblages along lines of

deterritorialization; and simultaneously, the same from the ingathered

forces of the earth to the deterritorialized, or rather deterritorializing,

Cosmos. How does Paul Klee present this last movement, which is not a

terrestrial "pace" but instead a cosmic "breakaway" [echappee: also

"opening," "outlet," "vista"; in counterpoint, "escape tone"—Trans.]? And

why so enormous a word, Cosmos, to discuss an operation that must be

precise? Klee says that one "tries convulsively to fly from the earth," and

that one "rises above it. . . powered by centrifugal forces that triumph over

gravity." He adds that the artist begins by looking around him- or herself,

into all the milieus, but does so in order to grasp the trace of creation in

the created, of naturing nature in natured nature; then, adopting "an

earthbound position,"

the artist turns his or her attention to the

microscopic, to crystals, molecules, atoms, and particles, not for

scientific conformity, but for movement, for nothing but immanent

movement; the artist tells him- or herself that this world has had different

aspects, will have still others, and that there are already others on other

planets; finally, the artist opens up to the Cosmos in order to harness forces

in a "work" (without which the opening onto the Cosmos would only be a

reverie incapable of enlarging the limits of the earth); this work requires

very simple, pure, almost childish means, but also the forces of a people,

which is what is still lacking. "We still lack the ultimate force....

338 D 1837: OF THE REFRAIN

We seek a people. We began over there in the Bauhaus.... More we cannot

do."

Classicism refers to form-matter relation, or rather a form-substance

relation (substance is precisely a matter endowed with form). Matter is

organized by a succession of forms that are compartmentalized, central-

ized, and hierarchized in relation to one another, each of which takes

charge of a greater or lesser amount of matter. Each form is like the code of

a milieu, and the passage from one form to another is a veritable

transcoding. Even the seasons are milieus. Two coexistent operations are

involved, one by which the form differentiates itself according to binary

distinctions, the other by which the formed substantial parts, milieus or

seasons, enter into an order of succession that can be the same in either

direction. But beneath these operations, the classical artist hazards an

extreme and dangerous adventure. He or she breaks down the milieus,

separates them, harmonizes them, regulates their mixtures, passes from

one to the other. What the artist confronts in this way is chaos, the forces

of chaos, the forces of a raw and untamed matter upon which Forms must

be imposed in order to make substances, and Codes in order to make

milieus. Phenomenal agility. That is why no one has ever been able to

draw a clear line between baroque and classical.

All of baroque lies

brewing beneath classicism: the task of the classical artist is God's own,

that of organizing chaos; and the artist's only cry is Creation! Creation!

The Tree of Creation! An ancient wooden flute organizes chaos, but chaos

reigns like the Queen of the Night. The classical artist proceeds with a

One-Two: the one-two of the differentiation of form divided

(man-woman, masculine and feminine rhythms, voices, families of instru-

ments, all the binarities of the ars nova); and the one-two of the

distinction between parts as they answer each other (the enchanted flute

and the magic bell). The little tune, the bird refrain, is the binary unity of

creation, the differentiating unity of the pure beginning: "At first the

piano complained alone, like a bird deserted by its mate; the violin heard

and answered it, as from a neighboring tree. It was as at the beginning of

the world, as if there were as yet only the two of them on earth, or ratherin

this world closed to all the rest, fashioned by the logic of a creator, in

which there would never be more than the two of them: this sonata."

If we attempt an equally summary definition of romanticism, we see

that everything is clearly different. A new cry resounds: the Earth, the terri-

tory and the Earth! With romanticism, the artist abandons the ambition of

de jure universality and his or her status as creator: the artist territorializes,

enters a territorial assemblage. The seasons are now territorialized. The

earth is certainly not the same thing as the territory. The earth is the intense

point at the deepest level of the territory or is projected outside it like a

1837:

OF THE REFRAIN D 339

focal point, where all the forces draw together in close embrace. The earth

is no longer one force among others, nor is it a substance endowed with

form or a coded milieu, with bounds and an apportioned share. The earth

has become that close embrace of all forces, those of the earth as well as of

other substances, so that the artist no longer confronts chaos, but hell and

the subterranean, the groundless. The artist no longer risks dissipation in

the milieus but rather sinking too deeply into the earth: Empedocles. The

artist no longer identifies with Creation but with the ground or foundation,

the foundation has become creative. The artist is no longer God but the

Hero who defies God: Found, Found, instead of Create. Faust, especially

the second Faust, is impelled by this tendency. Criticism, the Protestant-

ism of the earth, replaces dogmatism, the Catholicism of the milieus

(code). It is certain that the Earth as an intense point in depth or in projec-

tion, as ratio essendi, is always in disjunction with the territory; and the ter-

ritory as the condition of "knowledge," ratio cognoscendi, is always in

disjunction with the earth. The territory is German, the Earth Greek. And

this disjunction is precisely what determines the status of the romantic art-

ist, in that she or he no longer confronts the gaping of chaos but the pull of

the Ground (Fond). The little tune, the bird refrain, has changed: it is no

longer the beginning of a world but draws a territorial assemblage upon the

earth. It is then no longer made of two consonant parts that seek and answer

one another; it addresses itself to a deeper singing that founds it, but also

strikes against it and sweeps it away, making it ring dissonant. The refrain is

indissolubly constituted by the territorial song and the singing of the earth

that rises to drown it out. Thus at the end of Das Lied von der Erde (The

song of the Earth) there are two coexistent motifs, one melodic, evoking the

assemblages of the bird, the other rhythmic, evoking the deep, eternal

breathing of the earth. Mahler says that the singing of the birds, the color of

the flowers, and the fragrance of the forest are not enough to make Nature,

that the god Dionysus and the great Pan are needed. The Ur-refrain of the

earth harnesses all refrains whether territorial or not, and all milieu

refrains. By the end of [Berg's] Wozzeck, the lullaby refrain, military

refrain, drinking refrain, hunting refrain, child's refrain are so many admi-

rable assemblages swept up by the powerful earth machine and its cutting

edges: Wozzeck's voice, by which the earth becomes sonorous, Marie's

death cry moving over the pond, the repeated B note, when the earth

howled ... It is owing to this disjunction, this decoding, that the romantic

artist experiences the territory; but he or she experiences it as necessarily

lost, and experiences him- or herself as an exile, a voyager, as

deterrito-rialized, driven back into the milieus, like the Flying Dutchman

or King Waldemar (whereas the classical artist inhabited the milieus). Yet

this movement is still under earth's command, the repulsion from the

territory

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is produced by the attraction of the earth. The signpost now only indicates

the road of no return. This is the ambiguity of the natal, as it appears in the

lied (as well as in symphony and opera): the lied is simultaneously the terri-

tory, the lost territory, and the earth vector. The intermezzo assumed

increasing importance because it played on all the disjunctions between

the earth and the territory, inserted itself into them, filled them after its

fashion, "between night and day," "noon-midnight." From this standpoint,

the fundamental innovations of romanticism can be said to be the

following: There were no longer substantial parts corresponding to forms,

milieus corresponding to codes, or a matter in chaos given order in forms

and by codes. The parts were instead like assemblages produced and dis-

mantled at the surface. Form itself became a great form in continuous devel-
opment, a gathering of the forces of the earth taking all the parts up into a

sheaf. Matter itself was no longer a chaos to subjugate and organize but

rather the moving matter of a continuous variation. The universal had

become a relation, variation. The continuous variation of matter and the

continuous development of form. The assemblages thus placed matter and

form in a new relation: matter ceased to be a matter of content, becoming

instead a matter of expression, and form ceased to be a code subduing the

forces of chaos, becoming a force itself, the sum of the forces of the earth.

There was a new relation to danger, madness, limits: romanticism did not

go further than baroque classicism; it went elsewhere, with other givens

and other vectors.

What romanticism lacks most is a people. The territory is haunted by a

solitary voice; the voice of the earth resonates with it and provides it per-

cussion rather than answering it. Even when there is a people, it is

mediatized by the earth, it rises up from the bowels of the earth and is apt to

return there: more a subterranean than a terrestrial people. The hero is a

hero of the earth; he is mythic, rather than being a hero of the people and

historical. Germany, German romanticism, had a genius for experiencing

the natal territory not as deserted but as "solitary," regardless of popula-

tion density; for the population is only an emanation of the earth, and has

the value of One Alone. The territory does not open onto a people, it

half-opens onto the Friend, the Loved One; but the Loved One is already

dead, and the Friend uncertain, disturbing.

As in the lied, everything in the

territory occurs in relation to the One-Alone of the soul and the One-All of

the earth. That is why romanticism takes on an entirely different aspect

and even claims a different name, a different placard, in the Latin and

Slavic countries, where on the contrary everything is put in terms of the

theme of a people and the forces of a people. This time, it is the earth that

is mediatized by the people, and exists only through the people. This

time, the earth can be "deserted," an arid steppe, or a ravaged,

dismembered ter-

1837:

OF THE REFRAIN □ 341

ritory; yet it is never solitary, it is always filled by a nomadic population

that divides or regroups, contests or laments, attacks or suffers. This time,

the hero is a hero of the people, and not of the earth; her is related to the
One-Crowd, not the One-All. It certainly cannot be said that there is more or

less nationalism on one side or the other because nationalism is everywhere

in the figures of romanticism, sometimes as the driving force, sometimes as

a black hole (fascism used Verdi much less than nazism did Wagner). The

problem is a truly musical one, technically musical, and all the more politi-

cal for that. The romantic hero, the voice of the romantic hero, acts as a

subject, a subjectified individual with "feelings"; but this subjective vocal

element is reflected in an orchestral and instrumental whole that on the

contrary mobilizes nonsubjective "affects" and that reaches its height in

romanticism. It should not be thought that the vocal element and the

orchestral-instrumental whole are only in an extrinsic relation to one

another: the orchestration imposes a given role on the voice, and the voice

envelops a given mode of orchestration. Orchestration-instrumentation

brings sound forces together or separates them, gathers or disperses them;

but it changes, and the role of the voice changes too, depending on whether

the forces are of the Earth or of the People, of the One-All or the

One-Crowd. In the first case, it is a question of effecting grouping of powers,

and these are what constitute affects; in the second case, it is group
individuations that constitute affect and are the object of orchestration.

Groupings of power are fully diversified, but they are like the relations
proper to the Universal; we must use another word, the Dividual, to desig-

nate the type of musical relations and the intra- or intergroup passages

occurring in group individuation. The sentimental or subjective element

of the voice has a different role and even a different position depending on

whether it internally confronts nonsubjectified groupings of power or

nonsubjectified group individuation, the relations of the universal or the

relations of the "dividual." Debussy formulated the problem of the

One-Crowd well when he reproached Wagner for not knowing how to "do"

a crowd or a people: a crowd must be fully individuated, but by group

individuations that are not reducible to the individuality of the subjects

that compose the crowd.

The people must be individualized, not according

to the persons within it, but according to the affects it experiences,

simultaneously or successively. The concepts of the One-Crowd and the

Dividual are botched if the people is reduced to a juxtaposition, or if it is

reduced to a power of the universal. In short, there are two very different

conceptions of orchestration, depending on whether one is seeking to

sonorize the forces of the Earth or the forces of the People. The simplest

example of this difference is doubtless Wagner-Verdi, in that Verdi puts

increasing emphasis on the relations between the voice and instrumenta-

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tion and orchestration. Even today, Stockhausen and Berio outline a new

version of this difference, even though they are grappling with a musical

problem different from that of romanticism (in Berio there is a search for a

multiple cry, a cry of the population, in the dividual of the One-Crowd, and

not for a cry of the Earth in the universal of the One-All). The idea of an

Opera of the world, or cosmic music, changes drastically depending on

which pole of orchestration is in play.

To avoid an oversimplified opposi-

tion between Wagner and Verdi, we would have to show how Berlioz had a

genius for passing from one pole to the other in his orchestration, or even

hesitating between them: a sonorous Nature or People. And how music like

Mussorgsky's was able to do a crowd (despite what Debussy says). And how

music like Bartok's was able to use popular, or population, airs to do popu-

lations, themselves sonorous, instrumental, and orchestral, which impose

a Dividual scale, a prodigious new chromaticism.

And then there are all

the non-Wagnerian paths ...

If there is a modern age, it is, of course, the age of the cosmic. Paul Klee

declared himself anti-Faustian. "As for animals and all the other creatures,

I do not like them with a terrestrial cordiality; earthly things interest me

less than cosmic things." The assemblage no longer confronts the forces of

chaos, it no longer uses the forces of the earth or the people to deepen itself

but instead opens onto the forces of the Cosmos. All this seems extremely

general, and somewhat Hegelian, testifying to an absolute Spirit. Yet it is,

should be, a question of technique, exclusively a question of technique.

The essential relation is no longer matters-forms (or substances-attri-

butes); neither is it the continuous development of form and the continu-

ous variation of matter. It is now a direct relation material-forces. A

material is a molecularized matter, which must accordingly "harness"

forces; these forces are necessarily forces of the Cosmos. There is no longer

a matter that finds its corresponding principle of intelligibility in form. It is

now a question of elaborating a material charged with harnessing forces of

a different order: the visual material must capture nonvisible forces. Ren-
der visible, Klee said; not render or reproduce the visible. From this per-

spective, philosophy follows the same movement as the other activities;

whereas romantic philosophy still appealed to a formal synthetic identity

ensuring a continuous intelligibility of matter (a priori synthesis), modern

philosophy tends to elaborate a material of thought in order to capture

forces that are not thinkable in themselves. This is Cosmos philosophy,

after the manner of Nietzsche. The molecular material has even become so

deterritorialized that we can no longer even speak of matters of expression,

as we did in romantic territoriality. Matters of expression are superseded by
a material of capture. The forces to be captured are no longer those of the

earth, which still constitute a great expressive Form, but the forces of an

1837:

OF THE REFRAIN □ 343

immaterial, nonformal, and energetic Cosmos. The painter Millet used to

say that what counts in painting is not, for example, what a peasant is carry-

ing, whether it is a sacred object or a sack of potatoes, but its exact weight.

This is the postromantic turning point: the essential thing is no longer

forms and matters, or themes, but forces, densities, intensities. The earth

itself swings over, tending to take on the value of pure material for a force of

gravitation or weight. Perhaps it is not until Cezanne that rocks begin to

exist uniquely through the forces of folding they harness, landscapes

through thermal and magnetic forces, and apples through forces of germi-

nation: nonvisual forces that nevertheless have been rendered visible.

When forces become necessarily cosmic, material becomes necessarily

molecular, with enormous force operating in an infinitesimal space. The

problem is no longer that of the beginning, any more than it is that of a

foundation-ground. It is now a problem of consistency or consolidation:

how to consolidate the material, make it consistent, so that it can harness

unthinkable, invisible, nonsonorous forces. Debussy ... Music

molecu-larizes sound matter and in so doing becomes capable of

harnessing nonsonorous forces such as Duration and Intensity.

Render

Duration sonorous. Let us recall Nietzsche's idea of the eternal return as a

little ditty, a refrain, but which captures the mute and unthinkable forces

of the Cosmos. We thus leave behind the assemblages to enter the age of the

Machine, the immense mechanosphere, the plane of cosmicization of

forces to be harnessed. Varese's procedure, at the dawn of this age, is

exemplary: a musical machine of consistency, a sound machine (not a

machine for reproducing sounds), which molecularizes and atomizes,

ionizes sound matter, and harnesses a cosmic energy.

If this machine must

have an assemblage, it is the synthesizer. By assembling modules, source

elements, and elements for treating sound (oscillators, generators, and

transformers), by arranging microintervals, the synthesizer makes audible

the sound process itself, the production of that process, and puts us in

contact with still other elements beyond sound matter.

It unites disparate

elements in the material, and transposes the parameters from one formula

to another. The synthesizer, with its operation of consistency, has taken the

place of the ground in a priori synthetic judgment: its synthesis is of the

molecular and the cosmic, material and force, not form and matter, Grund

and territory. Philosophy is no longer synthetic judgment; it is like a

thought synthesizer functioning to make thought travel, make it mobile,

make it a force of the Cosmos (in the same way as one makes sound

travel).

This synthesis of disparate elements is not without ambiguity. It has the

same ambiguity, perhaps, as the modern valorization of children's draw-

ings, texts by the mad, and concerts of noise. Sometimes one overdoes it,

puts too much in, works with a jumble of lines and sounds; then instead of

344 □

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producing a cosmic machine capable of "rendering sonorous," one lapses

back to a machine of reproduction that ends up reproducing nothing but a

scribble effacing all lines, a scramble effacing all sounds. The claim is that

one is opening music to all events, all irruptions, but one ends up reproduc-

ing a scrambling that prevents any event from happening. All one has left is

a resonance chamber well on the way to forming a black hole. A material

that is too rich remains too "territorialized": on noise sources, on the

nature of the objects ... (this even applies to Cage's prepared piano). One

makes an aggregate fuzzy, instead of defining the fuzzy aggregate by the

operations of consistency or consolidation pertaining to it. For this is the

essential thing: a fuzzy aggregate, a synthesis of disparate elements, is
defined only by a degree of consistency that makes it possible to distinguish
the disparate elements constituting that aggregate (discernibility) ,

The

material must be sufficiently deterritorialized to be molecularized and

open onto something cosmic, instead of lapsing into a statistical heap. This

condition is met only if there is a certain simplicity in the nonuniform

material: a maximum of calculated sobriety in relation to the disparate ele-

ments and the parameters. The sobriety of the assemblages is what makes

for the richness of the Machine's effects. People often have too much of a

tendency to reterritorialize on the child, the mad, noise. If this is done, one
fuzzifies instead of making the fuzzy aggregate consist, or harnessing cos-

mic forces in the deterritorialized material. That is why it infuriated Paul

Klee when people would talk about the "childishness" of his drawings (and

Varese when they would talk about sound effects, etc.). According to Klee,

what is needed in order to "render visible" or harness the Cosmos is a pure

and simple line accompanied by the idea of an object, and nothing more: if

you multiply the lines and take the whole object, you get nothing but a

scramble, and visual sound effects.

According to Varese, in order for the

projection to yield a highly complex form, in other words, a cosmic distri-

bution, what is necessary is a simple figure in motion and a plane that is

itself mobile; otherwise, you get sound effects. Sobriety, sobriety: that is the

common prerequisite for the deterritorialization of matters, the

molecu-larization of material, and the cosmicization of forces. Maybe a

child can do that. But the sobriety involved is the sobriety of a

becoming-child that is not necessarily the becoming o/the child, quite the

contrary; the becoming-mad involved is not necessarily the becoming of

'the madman, quite the contrary. It is clear that what is necessary to make

sound travel, and to travel around sound, is very pure and simple sound,

an emission or wave without harmonics (La Monte Young has been

successful at this). The more rarefied the atmosphere, the more disparate

the elements you will find. Your synthesis of disparate elements will be all

the stronger if you proceed with a sober gesture, an act of consistency,

capture, or extraction that

1837:

OF THE REFRAIN □ 345

works in a material that is not meager but prodigiously simplified, crea-

tively limited, selected. For there is no imagination outside of technique.

The modern figure is not the child or the lunatic, still less the artist, but the

cosmic artisan: a homemade atomic bomb—it's very simple really, it's

been proven, it's been done. To be an artisan and no longer an artist, cre-

ator, or founder, is the only way to become cosmic, to leave the milieus and

the earth behind. The invocation to the Cosmos does not at all operate as a

metaphor; on the contrary, the operation is an effective one, from the

moment the artist connects a material with forces of consistency or

consolidation.

Material thus has three principal characteristics: it is a molecularized

matter; it has a relation to forces to be harnessed; and it is defined by the

operations of consistency applied to it. Finally, it is clear that the relation to

the earth and the people has changed, and is no longer of the romantic type.

The earth is now at its most deterritorialized: not only a point in a galaxy,

but one galaxy among others. The people is now at its most molecularized:

a molecular population, a people of oscillators as so many forces of interac-

tion. The artist discards romantic figures, relinquishes both the forces of

the earth and those of the people. The combat, if combat there is, has

moved. The established powers have occupied the earth, they have built

people's organizations. The mass media, the great people's organizations

of the party or union type, are machines for reproduction, fuzzification

machines that effectively scramble all the terrestrial forces of the people.

The established powers have placed us in the situation of a combat at once

atomic and cosmic, galactic. Many artists became aware of this situation

long ago, even before it had been installed (Nietzsche, for example). They

became aware of it because the same vector was traversing their own

domain: a molecularization, an atomization of the material, coupled with

a cosmicization of the forces taken up by that material. The question then

became whether molecular or atomic "populations" of all natures (mass

media, monitoring procedures, computers, space weapons) would con-

tinue to bombard the existing people in order to train it or control it or

annihilate it—or if other molecular populations were possible, could slip

into the first and give rise to a people yet to come. As Virilio says in his very

rigorous analysis of the depopulation of the people and the

deterrito-rialization of the earth, the question has become: "To dwell as a

poet or as an assassin?"

The assassin is one who bombards the existing

people with molecular populations that are forever closing all of the

assemblages, hurling them into an ever wider and deeper black hole. The

poet, on the other hand, is one who lets loose molecular populations in

hopes that this will sow the seeds of, or even engender, the people to

come, that these populations will pass into a people to come, open a

cosmos. Once again, we must

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not make it seem as though the poet gorged on metaphors: it may be that the

sound molecules of pop music are at this very moment implanting here and

there a people of a new type, singularly indifferent to the orders of the

radio, to computer safeguards, to the threat of the atomic bomb. In this

respect, the relation of artists to the people has changed significantly: the

artist has ceased to be the One-Alone withdrawn into him- or herself, but

has also ceased to address the people, to invoke the people as a constituted

force. Never has the artist been more in need of a people, while stating most

firmly that the people is lacking—the people is what is most lacking. We

are not referring to popular or populist artists. Mallarme said that the Book

needed a people. Kafka said that literature is the affair of the people. Klee

said that the people is essential yet lacking. Thus the problem of the artist is

that the modern depopulation of the people results in an open earth, and by

means of art, or by means to which art contributes. Instead of being bom-

barded from all sides in a limiting cosmos, the people and the earth must be

like the vectors of a cosmos that carries them off; then the cosmos itself will

be art. From depopulation, make a cosmic people; from

deterritorializa-tion, a cosmic earth—that is the wish of the artisan-artist,

here, there, locally. Our governments deal with the molecular and the

cosmic, and our arts make them their affair also, with the same stakes, the

people and the earth, and with unfortunately incomparable, but

nevertheless competitive, means. Is it not of the nature of creations to

operate in silence, locally, to seek consolidation everywhere, to go from the

molecular to an uncertain cosmos, whereas the processes of destruction

and conservation work in bulk, take center stage, occupy the entire

cosmos in order to enslave the molecular and to stick it in a conservatory

or a bomb?

These three "ages," the classical, romantic, and modern (for lack of a

better term), should not be interpreted as an evolution, or as structures sep-

arated by signifying breaks. They are assemblages enveloping different

Machines, or different relations to the Machine. In a sense, everything we

attribute to an age was already present in the preceding age. Forces, for

example: it has always been a question of forces, designated either as forces

of chaos or forces of the earth. Similarly, for all of time painting has had the

project of rendering visible, instead of reproducing the visible, and music

of rendering sonorous, instead of reproducing the sonorous. Fuzzy aggre-

gates have been constituting themselves and inventing their processes of

consolidation all along. A freeing of the molecular was already found in

classical matters of content, operating by destratification, and in romantic

matters of expression, operating by decoding. The most we can say is that

when forces appear as forces of the earth or of chaos, they are not grasped

directly as forces but as reflected in relations between matter and form.

Thus it is more a question of thresholds of perception, or thresholds of

1837:

OF THE REFRAIN D 347

discernibility belonging to given assemblages. It is only after matter has

been sufficiently deterritorialized that it itself emerges as molecular and

brings forth pure forces attributable only to the Cosmos. It had been pres-

ent "for all of time," but under different perceptual conditions. New condi-

tions were necessary for what was buried or covered, inferred or con-

cluded, presently to rise to the surface. What was composed in an

assemblage, what was still only composed, becomes a component of a new

assemblage. In this sense, all history is really the history of perception, and

what we make history with is the matter of a becoming, not the subject mat-

ter of a story. Becoming is like the machine: present in a different way in

every assemblage, passing from one to the other, opening one onto the

other, outside any fixed order or determined sequence.

We are now ready to return to the refrain. We can propose a new classifi-

cation system: milieu refrains, with at least two parts, one of which answers

the other (the piano and the violin); natal refrains, refrains of the territory,

where the part is related to the whole, to an immense refrain of the earth,

according to relations that are themselves variable and mark in each

instance the disjunction between the earth and the territory (the lullaby,

the drinking song, hunting song, work song, military song, etc.); folk and

popular refrains, themselves tied to an immense song of the people,

according to variable relations of crowd individuations that simultane-

ously bring into play affects and nations (the Polish, Auvergnat, German,

Magyar, or Romanian, but also the Pathetic, Panicked, Vengeful, etc.);

molecularized refrains (the sea and the wind) tied to cosmic forces, the

Cosmos refrain. For the Cosmos itself is a refrain, and the ear also (every-

thing that has been taken for a labyrinth is in fact a refrain). But precisely

why is the refrain eminently sonorous? Why this privileging of the ear,

when even animals and birds present us with so many visual, chromatic,

postural, and gestural refrains? Does the painter have fewer refrains than

the musician? Are there fewer refrains in Cezanne or Klee than in Mozart,

Schumann, or Debussy? Taking Proust's examples: Does Vermeer's little

yellow span of wall, or a painter's flowers, Elstir's roses, constitute less of a

refrain than Vinteuil's little phrase? There is surely no question here of

declaring a given art supreme on the basis of a formal hierarchy of absolute

criteria. Our problem is more modest: comparing the powers or coeffi-

cients of deterritorialization of sonorous and visual components. It seems

that when sound deterritorializes, it becomes more and more refined; it

becomes specialized and autonomous. Color clings more, not necessarily

to the object, but to territoriality. When it deterritorializes, it tends to

dissolve, to let itself be steered by other components. This is evident in

phenomena of synesthesia, which are not reducible to a simple color-sound

correspondence; sounds have a piloting role and induce colors that are

348 □

1837: OF THE REFRAIN

superposed upon the colors we see, lending them a properly sonorous

rhythm and movement.

Sound owes this power not to signifying or

"communicational" values (which on the contrary presuppose that pow-

er), nor to physical properties (which would privilege light over sound),

but to a phylogenetic line, a machinic phylum that operates in sound and

makes it a cutting edge of deterritorialization. But this does not happen

without great ambiguity: sound invades us, impels us, drags us,

transpierces us. It takes leave of the earth, as much in order to drop us into a

black hole as to open us up to a cosmos. It makes us want to die. Since its

force of deterritorialization is the strongest, it also effects the most massive

of reterritorializations, the most numbing, the most redundant. Ecstasy

and hypnosis. Colors do not move a people. Flags can do nothing without

trumpets. Lasers are modulated on sound. The refrain is sonorous par

excellence, but it can as easily develop its force into a sickly sweet ditty as

into the purest motif, or Vinteuil's little phrase. And sometimes the two

combine: Beethoven used as a "signature tune." The potential fascism of

music. Overall, we may say that music is plugged into a machinic phylum

infinitely more powerful than that of painting: a line of selective pressure.

That is why the musician has a different relation to the people, machines,

and the established powers than does the painter. In particular, the estab-

lished powers feel a keen need to control the distribution of black holes and

lines of deterritorialization in this phylum of sounds, in order to ward off

or appropriate the effects of musical machinism. Painters, at least as com-

monly portrayed, may be much more open socially, much more political,

and less controlled from without and within. That is because each time

they paint, they must create or recreate a phylum, and they must do so on

the basis of bodies of light and color they themselves produce, whereas

musicians have at their disposal a kind of germinal continuity, even if it is

latent or indirect, on the basis of which they produce sound bodies. Two

different movements of creation: one goes from soma to germen, and the

other from germen to soma. The painter's refrain is like the flipside of the

musician's, a negative of music.

So just what is a refrain? Glass harmonica: the refrain is a prism, a crys-

tal of space-time. It acts upon that which surrounds it, sound or light,

extracting from it various vibrations, or decompositions, projections, or

transformations. The refrain also has a catalytic function: not only to

increase the speed of the exchanges and reactions in that which surrounds

it, but also to assure indirect interactions between elements devoid of

so-called natural affinity, and thereby to form organized masses. The

refrain is therefore of the crystal or protein type. The seed, or internal

structure, then has two essential aspects: augmentations and diminutions,

additions and withdrawals, amplifications and eliminations by unequal

1837:

OF THE REFRAIN □ 349

values, but also the presence of a retrograde motion running in both direc-

tions, as "in the side windows of a moving streetcar." The strange ret-

rograde motion of Joke. It is of the nature of the refrain to become

concentrated by elimination in a very short moment, as though moving

from the extremes to a center, or, on the contrary, to develop by additions,

moving from a center to the extremes, and also to travel these routes in

both directions.

The refrain fabricates time (du temps). The refrain is the

"implied tense" (temps) discussed by the linguist Gustave Guillaume. The

ambiguity of the refrain is more evident now: for if the retrograde motion

merely forms a closed circle, if the augmentations and diminutions are reg-

ular, proceeding, for example, by doubled or halved values, then this false

spatiotemporal rigor leaves the exterior aggregate all the fuzzier; that

aggregate now has only descriptive, indicative, or associative relations

with the seed. It is "a worksite of inauthentic elements for the formation of

impure crystals," rather than a pure crystal that harnesses cosmic forces.

The refrain remains a formula evoking a character or landscape, instead of

itself constituting a rhythmic character or melodic landscape. The refrain

has two poles. These poles hinge not only on an intrinsic quality but also on

a state of force on the part of the listener; thus the little phrase from

Vinteuil's sonata is associated with Swann's love, the character of Odette,

and the landscape of the Bois de Boulogne for a long time, until it turns

back on itself, opens onto itself, revealing until then unheard-of potentiali-

ties, entering into other connections, setting love adrift in the direction of

other assemblages. Here, Time is not an a priori form; rather, the refrain is

the a priori form of time, which in each case fabricates different times
[temps: also, "meters," "tempos"—Trans.].

It is odd how music does not eliminate the bad or mediocre refrain, or

the bad usage of the refrain, but on the contrary carries it along, or uses it as

a springboard. "Ah, vous dirai-je maman" ("Ah, mamma, now you shall

know"), "Elle avait une jambe de bois" ("She had a wooden leg"), "Frere

Jacques." Childhood or bird refrain, folk song, drinking song, Viennese

waltz, cow bells: music uses anything and sweeps everything away. Not that

a folk song, bird song, or children's song is reducible to the kind of closed

and associative formula we just mentioned. Instead, what needs to be

shown is that a musician requires a first type of refrain, a territorial or

assemblage refrain, in order to transform it from within, deterritorialize it,

producing a refrain of the second type as the final end of music: the cosmic

refrain of a sound machine. Gisele Brelet, discussing Bartok, gives a good

formulation of the problem of the two types: beginning from popular and

territorial melodies that are autonomous, self-sufficient, and closed in

upon themselves, how can one construct a new chromaticism that places

them in communication, thereby creating "themes" bringing about a devel-

350 □

1837: OF THE REFRAIN

opment of Form, or rather a becoming of Forces? The problem is a general

one because in many directions refrains will be planted by a new seed that

brings back modes, makes those modes communicate, undoes tempera-

ment, melds major and minor, and cuts the tonal system loose, slipping

through its net instead of breaking with it.

We may say long live Chabrier,

as opposed to Schoenberg, just as Nietzsche said long live Bizet, and for the

same reasons, with the same technical and musical intent. We go from

modality to an untempered, widened chromaticism. We do not need to

suppress tonality, we need to turn it loose. We go from assembled refrains

(territorial, popular, romantic, etc.) to the great cosmic machined refrain.

But the labor of creation is already under way in the first type; it is there in

its entirety. Deformations destined to harness a great force are already

present in the small-form refrain or rondo. Childhood scenes, children's

games: the starting point is a childlike refrain, but the child has wings

already, he becomes celestial. The becoming-child of the musician is cou-

pled with a becoming-aerial of the child, in a nondecomposable block. The

memory of an angel, or rather the becoming of a cosmos. Crystal: the

becoming-bird of Mozart is inseparable from a becoming-initiate of the

bird, and forms a block with it.

It is the extremely profound labor dedi-

cated to the first type of refrain that creates the second type, or the little

phrase of the Cosmos. In a concerto, Schumann requires all the assem-

blages of the orchestra to make the cello wander the way a light fades into

the distance or is extinguished. In Schumann, a whole learned labor, at

once rythmic, harmonic, and melodic, has this sober and simple result:
deterritorialize the refrain.

Produce a deterritorialized refrain as the final

end of music, release it in the Cosmos—that is more important than build-

ing a new system. Opening the assemblage onto a cosmic force. In the pas-

sage from one to the other, from the assemblage of sounds to the Machine

that renders it sonorous, from the becoming-child of the musician to the

becoming-cosmic of the child, many dangers crop up: black holes, closures,

paralysis of the finger and auditory hallucinations, Schumann's madness,

cosmic force gone bad, a note that pursues you, a sound that transfixes you.

Yet one was already present in the other; the cosmic force was already pres-

ent in the material, the great refrain in the little refrains, the great maneu-

ver in the little maneuver. Except we can never be sure we will be strong

enough, for we have no system, only lines and movements. Schumann.

12. 1227: Treatise on Nomadology—

The War Machine

Nomad Chariot, Entirely of Wood, Altai, Fifth to Fourth Centuries B.C.

XIOM

I. The war machine is exterior to the State apparatus.

ROPOSITION

I. This exteriority is first attested to in mythology, epic,

drama, and games.

Georges Dumezil, in his definitive analyses of Indo-European mythology,

has shown that political sovereignty, or domination, has two heads: the

magician-king and the jurist-priest. Rex and flamen, raj and Brahman,

Romulus and Numa, Varuna and Mitra, the despot and the legislator, the

binder and the organizer. Undoubtedly, these two poles stand in opposi-

tion term by term, as the obscure and the clear, the violent and the calm, the

quick and the weighty, the fearsome and the regulated, the "bond" and the

"pact," etc.' But their opposition is only relative; they function as a pair, in

alternation, as though they expressed a division of the One or constituted

in themselves a sovereign unity. "At once antithetical and complementary,

necessary to one another and consequently without hostility, lacking a

351

352 □

1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

mythology of conflict: a specification on any one level automatically calls

forth a homologous specification on another. The two together exhaust the

field of the function." They are the principal elements of a State apparatus

that proceeds by a One-Two, distributes binary distinctions, and forms a

milieu of interiority. It is a double articulation that makes the State appara-

tus into a stratum.

It will be noted that war is not contained within this apparatus. Either

the State has at its disposal a violence that is not channeled through war—

either it uses police officers and jailers in place of warriors, has no arms and

no need of them, operates by immediate, magical capture, "seizes" and

"binds," preventing all combat—or, the State acquires an army, but in a

way that presupposes a juridical integration of war and the organization of

a military function.

As for the war machine in itself, it seems to be irreduc-

ible to the State apparatus, to be outside its sovereignty and prior to its law:

it comes from elsewhere. Indra, the warrior god, is in opposition to Varuna
no less than to Mitra? He can no more be reduced to one or the other than

he can constitute a third of their kind. Rather, he is like a pure and immeas-

urable multiplicity, the pack, an irruption of the ephemeral and the power

of metamorphosis. He unties the bond just as he betrays the pact. He brings
a furor to bear against sovereignty, a celerity against gravity, secrecy against

the public, a power (puissance) against sovereignty, a machine against the

apparatus. He bears witness to another kind of justice, one of incompre-

hensible cruelty at times, but at others of unequaled pity as well (because he

unties bonds.. .).

He bears witness, above all, to other relations with

women, with animals, because he sees all things in relations of becoming,

rather than implementing binary distributions between "states": a verita-

ble becoming-animal of the warrior, a becoming-woman, which lies out-

side dualities of terms as well as correspondences between relations. In

every respect, the war machine is of another species, another nature,

another origin than the State apparatus.

Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the

State apparatus in the context of the theory of games. Let us take chess and

Go, from the standpoint of the game pieces, the relations between the

pieces and the space involved. Chess is a game of State, or of the court: the

emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal

nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations,

and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight,

a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement

endowed with a relative power, and these relative powers combine in a sub-

ject of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game's form of

interiority. Go pieces, in contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic

units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function:

1227:

TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE □ 353

"It" makes a move. "It" could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go

pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no

intrinsic properties, only situational ones. Thus the relations are very dif-

ferent in the two cases. Within their milieu of interiority, chess pieces

entertain biunivocal relations with one another, and with the adversary's

pieces: their functioning is structural. On the other hand, a Go piece has

only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with nebulas or constella-

tions, according to which it fulfills functions of insertion or situation, such

as bordering, encircling, shattering. All by itself, a Go piece can destroy an

entire constellation synchronically; a chess piece cannot (or can do so

diachronically only). Chess is indeed a war, but an institutionalized, regu-

lated, coded war, with a front, a rear, battles. But what is proper to Go is war

without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles

even: pure strategy, whereas chess is a semiology. Finally, the space is not at

all the same: in chess, it is a question of arranging a closed space for oneself,

thus of going from one point to another, of occupying the maximum num-

ber of squares with the minimum number of pieces. In Go, it is a question

of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the

possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one

point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, with-

out departure or arrival. The "smooth" space of Go, as against the "stri-

ated" space of chess. The nomos of Go against the State of chess, nomos

against polis. The difference is that chess codes and decodes space, whereas

Go proceeds altogether differently, territorializing or deterritorializing it

(make the outside a territory in space; consolidate that territory by the con-

struction of a second, adjacent territory; deterritorialize the enemy by

shattering his territory from within; deterritorialize oneself by renouncing,

by going elsewhere . ..). Another justice, another movement, another

space-time.

"They come like fate, without reason, consideration, or pretext. . ." "In

some way that is incomprehensible they have pushed right into the capital.

At any rate, here they are; it seems that every morning there are more of

them."

Luc de Heusch analyzes a Bantu myth that leads us to the same

schema: Nkongolo, an indigenous emperor and administrator of public

works, a man of the public and a man of the police, gives his half-sisters to

the hunter Mbidi, who assists him and then leaves. Mbidi's son, a man of

secrecy, joins up with his father, only to return from the outside with that

inconceivable thing, an army. He kills Nkongolo and proceeds to build a

new State.

"Between" the magical-despotic State and the juridical State

containing a military institution, we see the flash of the war machine, arriv-

ing from without.

From the standpoint of the State, the originality of the man of war, his

354 □

1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

eccentricity, necessarily appears in a negative form: stupidity, deformity,

madness, illegitimacy, usurpation, sin. Dumezil analyzes the three "sins"

of the warrior in the Indo-European tradition: against the king, against the

priest, against the laws originating in the State (for example, a sexual trans-

gression that compromises the distribution of men and women, or even a

betrayal of the laws of war as instituted by the State).

The warrior is in the

position of betraying everything, including the function of the military, or

of understanding nothing. It happens that historians, both bourgeois and

Soviet, will follow this negative tradition and explain how Genghis Khan

understood nothing: he "didn't understand" the phenomenon of the city.

An easy thing to say. The problem is that the exteriority of the war machine

in relation to the State apparatus is everywhere apparent but remains diffi-

cult to conceptualize. It is not enough to affirm that the war machine is

external to the apparatus. It is necessary to reach the point of conceiving

the war machine as itself a pure form of exteriority, whereas the State appa-

ratus constitutes the form of interiority we habitually take as a model, or

according to which we are in the habit of thinking. What complicates

everything is that this extrinsic power of the war machine tends, under cer-

tain circumstances, to become confused with one of the two heads of the

State apparatus. Sometimes it is confused with the magic violence of the

State, at other times with the State's military institution. For instance, the

war machine invents speed and secrecy; but there is all the same a certain

speed and a certain secrecy that pertain to the State, relatively, secondarily.

So there is a great danger of identifying the structural relation between the

two poles of political sovereignty, and the dynamic interrelation of these

two poles, with the power of war. Dumezil cites the lineage of the Roman

kings: there is a Romulus-Numa relation that recurs throughout a series,

with variants and an alternation between these two types of equally legiti-

mate rulers; but there is also a relation with an "evil king," Tullus Hostilius,

Tarquinius Superbus, an upsurge of the warrior as a disquieting and illegit-

imate character.

Shakespeare's kings could also be invoked: even violence,

murders, and perversion do not prevent the State lineage from producing

"good" kings; but a disturbing character like Richard III slips in, announc-

ing from the outset his intention to reinvent a war machine and impose its

line (deformed, treacherous and traitorous, he claims a "secret close

intent"

totally different from the conquest of State power, and another

—an other—relation with women). In short, whenever the irruption of war

power is confused with the line of State domination, everything gets mud-

dled; the war machine can then be understood only through the categories

of the negative, since nothing is left that remains outside the State. But,

returned to its milieu of exteriority, the war machine is seen to be of

another species, of another nature, of another origin. One would have to

1227:

TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE □ 355

say that it is located between the two heads of the State, between the two

articulations, and that it is necessary in order to pass from one to the other.

But "between" the two, in that instant, even ephemeral, if only a flash, it

proclaims its own irreducibility. The State has no war machine of its own; it

can only appropriate one in the form of a military institution, one that will

continually cause it problems. This explains the mistrust States have

toward their military institutions, in that the military institution inherits

an extrinsic war machine. Karl von Clausewitz has a general sense of this

situation when he treats the flow of absolute war as an Idea that States par-

tially appropriate according to their political needs, and in relation to

which they are more or less good "conductors."

Trapped between the two poles of political sovereignty, the man of war

seems outmoded, condemned, without a future, reduced to his own fury,

which he turns against himself. The descendants of Hercules, Achilles,

then Ajax, have enough strength left to proclaim their independence from

Agamemnon, a man of the old State. But they are powerless when it comes

to Ulysses, a man of the nascent modern State, the first man of the modern

State. And it is Ulysses who inherits Achilles' arms, only to convert them to

other uses, submitting them to the laws of the State—not Ajax, who is con-

demned by the goddess he defied and against whom he sinned.

No one

has portrayed the situation of the man of war, at once eccentric and con-

demned, better than Kleist. In Penthesilea, Achilles is already separated

from his power: the war machine has passed over to the Amazons, a State-

less woman-people whose justice, religion, and loves are organized

uniquely in a war mode. Descendants of the Scythians, the Amazons spring

forth like lightning, "between" the two States, the Greek and the Trojan.

They sweep away everything in their path. Achilles is brought before his

double, Penthesilea. And in his ambiguous struggle, Achilles is unable to

prevent himself from marrying the war machine, or from loving Penthe-

silea, and thus from betraying Agamemnon and Ulysses at the same time.

Nevertheless, he already belongs enough to the Greek State that Pen-

thesilea, for her part, cannot enter the passional relation of war with him

without herself betraying the collective law of her people, the law of the

pack that prohibits "choosing" the enemy and entering into one-to-one

relationships or binary distinctions.

Throughout his work, Kleist celebrates the war machine, setting it

against the State apparatus in a struggle that is lost from the start. Doubt-

less Arminius heralds a Germanic war machine that breaks with the imper-

ial order of alliances and armies, and stands forever opposed to the Roman

State. But the Prince of Homburg lives only in a dream and stands con-

demned for having reached victory in disobedience of the law of the State.

As for Kohlhaas, his war machine can no longer be anything more than

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1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

banditry. Is it the destiny of the war machine, when the State triumphs, to

be caught in this alternative: either to be nothing more than the disci-

plined, military organ of the State apparatus, or to turn against itself, to

become a double suicide machine for a solitary man and a solitary woman?

Goethe and Hegel, State thinkers both, see Kleist as a monster, and Kleist

has lost from the start. Why is it, then, that the most uncanny modernity

lies with him? It is because the elements of his work are secrecy, speed, and

affect.'' And in Kleist the secret is no longer a content held within a form of

interiority; rather, it becomes a form, identified with the form of

exteriority that is always external to itself. Similarly, feelings become

uprooted from the interiority of a "subject," to be projected violently out-

ward into a milieu of pure exteriority that lends them an incredible veloc-

ity, a catapulting force: love or hate, they are no longer feelings but affects.

And these affects are so many instances of the becoming-woman, the

becoming-animal of the warrior (the bear, she-dogs). Affects transpierce

the body like arrows, they are weapons of war. The deterritorialization

velocity of affect. Even dreams (Homburg's, Pentheselea's) are externa-

lized, by a system of relays and plug-ins, extrinsic linkages belonging to the

war machine. Broken rings. This element of exteriority—which dominates

everything, which Kleist invents in literature, which he is the first to

invent—will give time a new rhythm: an endless succession of catatonic

episodes or fainting spells, and flashes or rushes. Catatonia is: "This affect

is too strong for me," and a flash is: "The power of this affect sweeps me

away," so that the Self (Moi) is now nothing more than a character whose

actions and emotions are desubjectified, perhaps even to the point of

death. Such is Kleist's personal formula: a succession of flights of madness

and catatonic freezes in which no subjective interiority remains. There is

much of the East in Kleist: the Japanese fighter, interminably still, who

then makes a move too quick to see. The Go player. Many things in modern

art come from Kleist. Goethe and Hegel are old men next to Kleist. Could it

be that it is at the moment the war machine ceases to exist, conquered by

the State, that it displays to the utmost its irreducibility, that it scatters into

thinking, loving, dying, or creating machines that have at their disposal

vital or revolutionary powers capable of challenging the conquering State?

Is the war machine already overtaken, condemned, appropriated as part of

the same process whereby it takes on new forms, undergoes a metamorpho-

sis, affirms its irreducibility and exteriority, and deploys that milieu of

pure exteriority that the occidental man of the State, or the occidental

thinker, continually reduces to something other than itself?

ROBLEM

I. Is there a way of warding off the formation of a State apparatus

(or its equivalents in a group)?

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TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE □ 357

ROPOSITION

II. The exteriority of the war machine is also attested to by

ethnology (a tribute to the memory of Pierre Clastres).

Primitive, segmentary societies have often been defined as societies

without a State, in other words, societies in which distinct organs of power
do not appear. But the conclusion has been that these societies did not
reach the degree of economic development, or the level of political differ-
entiation, that would make the formation of the State apparatus both
possible and inevitable: the implication is that primitive people "don't
understand" so complex an apparatus. The prime interest in Pierre
Clastres's theories is that they break with this evolutionist postulate. Not
only does he doubt that the State is the product of an ascribable economic
development, but he asks if it is not a potential concern of primitive socie-
ties to ward off or avert that monster they supposedly do not understand.
Warding off the formation of a State apparatus, making such a formation
impossible, would be the objective of a certain number of primitive social
mechanisms, even if they are not consciously understood as such. To be
sure, primitive societies have chiefs. But the State is not defined by the exis-
tence of chiefs; it is defined by the perpetuation or conservation of organs
of power. The concern of the State is to conserve. Special institutions are
thus necessary to enable a chief to become a man of State, but diffuse, col-
lective mechanisms are just as necessary to prevent a chief from becoming
one. Mechanisms for warding off, preventive mechanisms, are a part of
chieftainship and keep an apparatus distinct from the social body from
crystallizing. Clastres describes the situation of the chief, who has no insti-
tuted weapon other than his prestige, no other means of persuasion, no
other rule than his sense of the group's desires. The chief is more like a
leader or a star than a man of power and is always in danger of being disa-
vowed, abandoned by his people. But Clastres goes further, identifying war
in primitive societies as the surest mechanism directed against the forma-
tion of the State: war maintains the dispersal and segmentarity of groups,
and the warrior himself is caught in a process of accumulating exploits
leading him to solitude and a prestigious but powerless death.

Clastres

can thus invoke natural Law while reversing its principal proposition: just
as Hobbes saw clearly that the State was against war, so war is against the
State, and makes it impossible. It should not be concluded that war is a
state of nature, but rather that it is the mode of a social state that wards off
and prevents the State. Primitive war does not produce the State any more
than it derives from it. And it is no better explained by exchange than by
the State: far from deriving from exchange, even as a sanction for its fail-
ure, war is what limits exchanges, maintains them in the framework of

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"alliances"; it is what prevents them from becoming a State factor, from

fusing groups.

The importance of this thesis is first of all to draw attention to collective

mechanisms of inhibition. These mechanisms may be subtle, and function

as micromechanisms. This is easily seen in certain band or pack phenom-

ena. For example, in the case of gangs of street children in Bogota, Jacques

Meunier cites three ways in which the leader is prevented from acquiring

stable power: the members of the band meet and undertake their theft

activity in common, with collective sharing of the loot, but they disperse to

eat or sleep separately; also, and especially, each member of the band is

paired off with one, two, or three other members, so if he has a disagree-

ment with the leader, he will not leave alone but will take along his allies,

whose combined departure will threaten to break up the entire gang;

finally, there is a diffuse age limit, and at about age fifteen a member is

inevitably induced to quit the gang.

These mechanisms cannot be under-

stood without renouncing the evolutionist vision that sees bands or packs

as a rudimentary, less organized, social form. Even in bands of animals,

leadership is a complex mechanism that does not act to promote the

strongest but rather inhibits the installation of stable powers, in favor of a

fabric of immanent relations.

One could just as easily compare the form

"high-society life" to the form "sociability" among the most highly evolved

men and women: high-society groups are similar to gangs and operate by

the diffusion of prestige rather than by reference to centers of power, as in

social groupings (Proust clearly showed this noncorrespondence of

high-society values and social values). Eugene Sue, a man of high society

and a dandy, whom legitimists reproached for frequenting the Orleans

family, used to say: "I'm not on the side of the family, I side with the pack."

Packs, bands, are groups of the rhizome type, as opposed to the

arborescent type that centers around organs of power. That is why bands

in general, even those engaged in banditry or high-society life, are

metamorphoses of a war machine formally distinct from all State

apparatuses or their equivalents, which are instead what structure

centralized societies. We certainly would not say that discipline is what

defines a war machine: discipline is the characteristic required of armies

after the State has appropriated them. The war machine answers to other

rules. We are not saying that they are better, of course, only that they

animate a fundamental indiscipline of the warrior, a questioning of

hierarchy, perpetual blackmail by abandonment or betrayal, and a very

volatile sense of honor, all of which, once again, impedes the formation

of the State.

But why does this argument fail to convince us entirely? We follow

Clastres when he demonstrates that the State is explained neither by a

development of productive forces nor by a differentiation of political

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forces. It is the State, on the contrary, that makes possible the undertaking

of large-scale projects, the constitution of surpluses, and the organization

of the corresponding public functions. The State is what makes the distinc-

tion between governors and governed possible. We do not see how the State

can be explained by what it presupposes, even with recourse to dialectics.

The State seems to rise up in a single stroke, in an imperial form, and does

not depend on progressive factors. Its on-the-spot emergence is like a

stroke of genius, the birth of Athena. We also follow Clastres when he shows

that the war machine is directed against the State, either against potential

States whose formation it wards off in advance, or against actual States

whose destruction it purposes. No doubt the war machine is realized more

completely in the "barbaric" assemblages of nomadic warriors than in the

"savage" assemblages of primitive societies. In any case, it is out of the

question that the State could be the result of a war in which the conquerors

imposed, by the very fact of their victory, a new law on the vanquished,

because the organization of the war machine is directed against the

State-form, actual or virtual. The State is no better accounted for as a

result of war than by a progression of economic or political forces. This

is where Clastres locates the break: between "primitive" counter-State

societies and "monstrous" State societies whose formation it is no longer

possible to explain. Clastres is fascinated by the problem of "voluntary

servitude," in the manner of La Boetie: In what way did people want or

desire servitude, which most certainly did not come to them as the

outcome of an involuntary and unfortunate war? They did, after all, have

counter-State mechanisms at their disposal: So how and why the State?

Why did the State triumph? The more deeply Clastres delved into the

problem, the more he seemed to deprive himself of the means of resolving

it.'

He tended to make primitive societies hypostases, self-sufficient

entities (he insisted heavily on this point). He made their formal

exteriority into a real independence. Thus he remained an evolutionist,

and posited a state of nature. Only this state of nature was, according to

him, a fully social reality instead of a pure concept, and the evolution was

a sudden mutation instead of a development. For on the one hand, the

State rises up in a single stroke, fully formed; on the other, the

counter-State societies use very specific mechanisms to ward it off, to

prevent it from arising. We believe that these two propositions are valid

but that their interlinkage is flawed. There is an old scenario: "from clans

to empires," or "from bands to kingdoms." But nothing says that this

constitutes an evolution, since bands and clans are no less organized than

empire-kingdoms. We will never leave the evolution hypothesis behind

by creating a break between the two terms, that is, by endowing bands

with self-sufficiency and the State with an emergence all the more

miraculous and monstrous.

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We are compelled to say that there has always been a State, quite perfect,

quite complete. The more discoveries archaeologists make, the more

empires they uncover. The hypothesis of the Urstaat seems to be verified:

"The State clearly dates back to the most remote ages of humanity." It is

hard to imagine primitive societies that would not have been in contact

with imperial States, at the periphery or in poorly controlled areas. But of

greater importance is the inverse hypothesis: that the State itself has always

been in a relation with an outside and is inconceivable independent of that

relationship. The law of the State is not the law of All or Nothing (State

societies or counter-State societies) but that of interior and exterior. The

State is sovereignty. But sovereignty only reigns over what it is capable of

internalizing, of appropriating locally. Not only is there no universal State,

but the outside of States cannot be reduced to "foreign policy," that is, to a

set of relations among States. The outside appears simultaneously in two

directions: huge worldwide machines branched out over the entire
ecumenon at a given moment, which enjoy a large measure of autonomy in

relation to the States (for example, commercial organization of the "multi-

national" type, or industrial complexes, or even religious formations like

Christianity, Islam, certain prophetic or messianic movements, etc.); but

also the local mechanisms of bands, margins, minorities, which continue

to affirm the rights of segmentary societies in opposition to the organs of

State power. The modern world can provide us today with particularly

well developed images of these two directions: worldwide ecumenical

machines, but also a neoprimitivism, a new tribal society as described by

Marshall McLuhan. These directions are equally present in all social

fields, in all periods. It even happens that they partially merge. For exam-

ple, a commercial organization is also a band of pillage, or piracy, for part

of its course and in many of its activities; or it is in bands that a religious

formation begins to operate. What becomes clear is that bands, no less than

worldwide organizations, imply a form irreducible to the State and that

this form of exteriority necessarily presents itself as a diffuse and

polymorphous war machine. It is a nomos very different from the "law."

The State-form, as a form of interiority, has a tendency to reproduce itself,

remaining identical to itself across its variations and easily recognizable

within the limits of its poles, always seeking public recognition (there is no

masked State). But the war machine's form of exteriority is such that it

exists only in its own metamorphoses; it exists in an industrial innovation

as well as in a technological invention, in a commercial circuit as well as in a

religious creation, in all flows and currents that only secondarily allow

themselves to be appropriated by the State. It is in terms not of indepen-

dence, but of coexistence and competition in a perpetual field of interac-
tion, that we must conceive of exteriority and interiority, war machines of

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TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 361

metamorphosis and State apparatuses of identity, bands and kingdoms,

megamachines and empires. The same field circumscribes its interiority in

States, but describes its exteriority in what escapes States or stands against

States.

ROPOSITION

III. The exteriority of the war ma chine is also attested to by

epistemology, which intimates the existence and perpetuation of a
"nomad"or "minor science."

There is a kind of science, or treatment of science, that seems very dif-

ficult to classify, whose history is even difficult to follow. What we are

referring to are not "technologies" in the usual sense of the term. But nei-

ther are they "sciences" in the royal or legal sense established by history.

According to a recent book by Michel Serres, both the atomic physics of

Democritus and Lucretius and the geometry of Archimedes are marked

by it.

The characteristics of this kind of eccentric science would seem to

be the following:

1. First of all, it uses a hydraulic model, rather than being a theory of

solids treating fluids as a special case; ancient atomism is inseparable from

flows, and flux is reality itself, or consistency.

2. The model in question is one of becoming and heterogeneity, as

opposed to the stable, the eternal, the identical, the constant. It is a "para-

dox" to make becoming itself a model, and no longer a secondary charac-

teristic, a copy; in the Timaeus, Plato raises this possibility, but only in

order to exclude it and conjure it away in the name of royal science. By con-

trast, in atomism, just such a model of heterogeneity, and of passage or

becoming in the heterogeneous, is furnished by the famed declination of

the atom. The clinamen, as the minimum angle, has meaning only between

a straight line and a curve, the curve and its tangent, and constitutes the

original curvature of the movement of the atom. The clinamen is the small-

est angle by which an atom deviates from a straight path.

It is a passage to

the limit, an exhaustion, a paradoxical "exhaustive" model. The same

applies to Archimedean geometry, in which the straight line, defined as

"the shortest path between two points," is just a way of defining the length

of a curve in a predifferential calculus.

3. One no longer goes from the straight line to its parallels, in a lamellar

or laminar flow,

but from a curvilinear declination to the formation of

spirals and vortices on an inclined plane: the greatest slope for the smallest

angle. From turba to turbo: in other words, from bands or packs of atoms to

the great vortical organizations.

The model is a vortical one; it operates in

an open space throughout which things-flows are distributed, rather than

plotting out a closed space for linear and solid things. It is the difference

between a smooth (vectorial, projective, or topological) space and a striated

362 □ 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

(metric) space: in the first case "space is occupied without being counted,"

and in the second case "space is counted in order to be occupied."

4. Finally, the model is problematic, rather than theorematic: figures

are considered only from the viewpoint of the affections that befall them:

sections, ablations, adjunctions, projections. One does not go by specific

differences from a genus to its species, or by deduction from a stable

essence to the properties deriving from it, but rather from a problem to

the accidents that condition and resolve it. This involves all kinds of

deformations, transmutations, passages to the limit, operations in which

each figure designates an "event" much more than an essence; the square

no longer exists independently of a quadrature, the cube of a cubature, the

straight line of a rectification. Whereas the theorem belongs to the

rational order, the problem is affective and is inseparable from the meta-

morphoses, generations, and creations within science itself. Despite what

Gabriel Marcel may say, the problem is not an "obstacle"; it is the surpass-

ing of the obstacle, a pro-jection, in other words, a war machine. All of this

movement is what royal science is striving to limit when it reduces as

much as possible the range of the "problem-element" and subordinates it

to the "theorem-element."

This Archimedean science, or this conception of science, is bound up in

an essential way with the war machine: theproblemata are the war machine

itself and are inseparable from inclined planes, passages to the limit, vorti-

ces, and projections. It would seem that the war machine is projected into

an abstract knowledge formally different from the one that doubles the

State apparatus. It would seem that a whole nomad science develops

eccentrically, one that is very different from the royal or imperial sciences.

Furthermore, this nomad science is continually "barred," inhibited, or

banned by the demands and conditions of State science. Archimedes, van-

quished by the Roman State, becomes a symbol.

The fact is that the two

kinds of science have different modes of formalization, and State science

continually imposes its form of sovereignty on the inventions of nomad

science. State science retains of nomad science only what it can appropri-

ate; it turns the rest into a set of strictly limited formulas without any real

scientific status, or else simply represses and bans it. It is as if the "savants"

of nomad science were caught between a rock and a hard place, between the

war machine that nourishes and inspires them and the State that imposes

upon them an order of reasons. The figure of the engineer (in particular the

military engineer), with all its ambivalence, is illustrative of this situation.

Most significant are perhaps borderline phenomena in which nomad sci-

ence exerts pressure on State science, and, conversely, State science appro-

priates and transforms the elements of nomad science. This is true of the

art of encampments, "castrametation," which has always mobilized pro-

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TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE □ 363

jections and inclined planes: the State does not appropriate this dimension

of the war machine without submitting it to civil and metric rules that

strictly limit, control, localize nomad science, and without keeping it from

having repercussions throughout the social field (in this respect, Vauban is

like a repeat of Archimedes, and suffers an analogous defeat). It is true of

descriptive and projective geometry, which royal science would like to turn

into a mere practical dependency of analytic, or so-called higher, geometry

(thus the ambiguous situation of Monge and Poncelet as "savants").

It is

also true of differential calculus. For a long time, it had only parascientific

status and was labeled a "Gothic hypothesis"; royal science only accorded

it the value of a convenient convention or a well-founded fiction. The great

State mathematicians did their best to improve its status, but precisely on

the condition that all the dynamic, nomadic notions—such as becoming,

heterogeneity, infinitesimal, passage to the limit, continuous variation

—be eliminated and civil, static, and ordinal rules be imposed upon it

(Carnot's ambiguous position in this respect). Finally, it is true of the

hydraulic model, for it is certain that the State itself needs a hydraulic sci-

ence (there is no going back on Wittfogel's theses on the importance of

large-scale waterworks for an empire). But it needs it in a very different

form, because the State needs to subordinate hydraulic force to conduits,

pipes, embankments, which prevent turbulence, which constrain move-

ment to go from one point to another, and space itself to be striated and

measured, which makes the fluid depend on the solid, and flows proceed

by parallel, laminar layers. The hydraulic model of nomad science and the

war machine, on the other hand, consists in being distributed by turbu-

lence across a smooth space, in producing a movement that holds space

and simultaneously affects all of its points, instead of being held by space in

a local movement from one specified point to another.

Democritus,

Menaechmus, Archimedes, Vauban, Desargues, Bernoulli, Monge,

Carnot, Poncelet, Perronet, etc.: in each case a monograph would be neces-

sary to take into account the special situation of these savants whom State

science used only after restraining or disciplining them, after repressing

their social or political conceptions.

The sea as a smooth space is a specific problem of the war machine. As

Virilio shows, it is at sea that the problem of the fleet in being is posed, in

other words, the task of occupying an open space with a vortical movement

that can rise up at any point. In this respect, the recent studies on rhythm,

on the origin of that notion, do not seem entirely convincing. For we are

told that rhythm has nothing to do with the movement of waves but rather

that it designates "form" in general, and more specifically the form of a

"measured, cadenced" movement.

However, rhythm is never the same as

measure. And though the atomist Democritus is one of the authors who

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speak of rhythm in the sense of form, it should be borne in mind that he

does so under very precise conditions of fluctuation and that the forms

made by atoms are primarily large, nonmetric aggregates, smooth spaces

such as the air, the sea, or even the earth (magnae res). There is indeed such

a thing as measured, cadenced rhythm, relating to the coursing of a river

between its banks or to the form of a striated space; but there is also a

rhythm without measure, which relates to the upswell of a flow, in other

words, to the manner in which a fluid occupies a smooth space.

This opposition, or rather this tension-limit between the two kinds of

science—nomad, war machine science and royal, State science—reap-

pears at different moments, on different levels. The work of Anne Querrien

enables us to identify two of these moments; one is the construction of

Gothic cathedrals in the twelfth century, the other the construction of

bridges in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Gothic architecture is

indeed inseparable from a will to build churches longer and taller than the

Romanesque churches. Ever farther, ever higher ... But this difference is

not simply quantitative; it marks a qualitative change: the static relation,

form-matter, tends to fade into the background in favor of a dynamic rela-

tion, material-forces. It is the cutting of the stone that turns it into material

capable of holding and coordinating forces of thrust, and of constructing

ever higher and longer vaults. The vault is no longer a form but the line of

continuous variation of the stones. It is as if Gothic conquered a smooth

space, while Romanesque remained partially within a striated space (in

which the vault depends on the juxtaposition of parallel pillars). But stone

cutting is inseparable from, on the one hand, a plane of projection at

ground level, which functions as a plane limit, and, on the other hand, a

series of successive approximations (squaring), or placings-in-variation of

voluminous stones. Of course, one appealed to the theorematic science of

Euclid in order to find a foundation for the enterprise: mathematical fig-

ures and equations were thought to be the intelligible form capable of orga-

nizing surfaces and volumes. But according to the legend, Bernard de

Clairvaux quickly abandoned the effort as too "difficult," appealing to the

specificity of an operative, Archimedean geometry, a projective and

descriptive geometry defined as a minor science, more a mathegraphy than

a matheology. His journeyman, the monk-mason Garin de Troyes, speaks

of an operative logic of movement enabling the "initiate" to draw, then hew

the volumes "in penetration in space," to make it so that "the cutting line

propels the equation" (le trait pousse le chiffre).

One does not represent,

one engenders and traverses. This science is characterized less by the

absence of equations than by the very different role they play: instead of

being good forms absolutely that organize matter, they are "generated" as

"forces of thrust" (poussees) by the material, in a qualitative calculus of the

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TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE □ 365

optimum. This whole current of Archimedean geometry was taken to its

highest expression, but was also brought to a temporary standstill, by the

remarkable seventeenth-century mathematician Desargues. Like most of

his kind, Desargues wrote little; he nevertheless exerted a great influence

through his actions and left outlines, rough drafts, and projects, all cen-

tered on problem-events: "Lamentations," "draft project for the cutting of

stones," "draft project for grappling with the events of the encounters of a

cone and a plane,. .. Desargues, however, was condemned by the
parlement of Paris, opposed by the king's secretary; his practices of per-

spective were banned.

Royal, or State, science only tolerates and appro-

priates stone cutting by means of templates (the opposite of squaring),

under conditions that restore the primacy of the fixed model of form,

mathematical figures, and measurement. Royal science only tolerates and

appropriates perspective if it is static, subjected to a central black hole

divesting it of its heuristic and ambulatory capacities. But the adventure,

or event, of Desargues is the same one that had already occurred among the

Gothic "journeymen" on a collective level. For not only did the Church, in

its imperial form, feel the need to strictly control the movement of this

nomad science (it entrusted the Templars with the responsibility of deter-

mining its locations and objects, governing the work sites, and regulating

construction), but the secular State, in its royal form, turned against the

Templars themselves, banning the guilds for a number of reasons, at least

one of which was the prohibition of this operative or minor geometry.

Is Anne Querrien right to find yet another echo of the same story in the

case of bridges in the eighteenth century? Doubtless, the conditions were

very different, for the division of labor according to State norms was by

then an accomplished fact. But the fact remains that in the government

agency in charge of bridges and roadways, roadways were under a

well-centralized administration while bridges were still the object of

active, dynamic, and collective experimentation. Trudaine organized

unusual, open "general assemblies" in his home. Perronet took as his

inspiration a supple model originating in the Orient: The bridge should

not choke or obstruct the river. To the heaviness of the bridge, to the

striated space of thick and regular piles, he opposed a thinning and

discontinuity of the piles, surbase, and vault, a lightness and continuous

variation of the whole. But his attempt soon ran up against principled

opposition; the State, in naming Perronet director of the school, followed

a frequently used procedure that inhibited experimentation more than

crowning its achievements. The whole history of the Ecole des Ponts et

Chaussees (School of Bridges and Roadways) illustrates how this old,

plebeian "corps" was subordinated to the Ecole des Mines, the Ecole des

Travaux Publics, and the Ecole Polytechnique, at the same time as its

activities were increasingly

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normalized.

We thus come to the question, What is a collective bodyl

Undoubtedly, the great collective bodies of a State are differentiated and

hierarchical organisms that on the one hand enjoy a monopoly over a

power or function and on the other hand send out local representatives.

They have a special relation to families, because they link the family model

to the State model at both ends and regard themselves as "great families" of

functionaries, clerks, intendants, or farmers. Yet it seems that in many of

these collective bodies there is something else at work that does not fit into

this schema. It is not just their obstinate defense of their privileges. It is also

their aptitude—even caricatural or seriously deformed—to constitute

themselves as a war machine, following other models, another dynamism,

a nomadic ambition, over against the State. As an example, there is the

very old problem of the lobby, a group with fluid contours, whose position

is very ambiguous in relation to the State it wishes to "influence" and the

war machine it wishes to promote, to whatever ends.

A body {corps) is not reducible to an organism, any more than esprit de

corps is reducible to the soul of an organism. Spirit is not better, but it is

volatile, whereas the soul is weighted, a center of gravity. Must we invoke a

military origin of the collective body and esprit de corps? "Military" is not

the part that counts, but rather the distant nomadic origin. Ibn Khaldun

defines the nomad war machine by: families or lineages

PLUS

esprit de

corps. The war machine entertains a relation to families that is very differ-

ent from its relation to the State. In the war machine, the family is a band

vector instead of a fundamental cell; a genealogy is transferred from one

family to another according to the aptitude of a given family at a given time

to realize the maximum of "agnatic solidarity." Here, it is not the public

eminence of a family that determines its place in a State organism but the

reverse; it is the secret power (puissance), or strength of solidarity, and the

corresponding genealogical mobility that determine its eminence in a war

body.

This has to do neither with the monopoly of an organic power

(pouvoir) nor with local representation, but is related to the potential (puis-
sance) of a vortical body in a nomad space. Of course, the great bodies of a

modern State can hardly be thought of as Arab tribes. What we wish to say,

rather, is that collective bodies always have fringes or minorities that recon-

stitute equivalents of the war machine—in sometimes quite unforeseen

forms—in specific assemblages such as building bridges or cathedrals or

rendering judgments or making music or instituting a science, a technology

... A collective body of captains asserts its demands through the organiza-

tion of the officers and the organism of the superior officers. There are

always periods when the State as organism has problems with its own col-

lective bodies, when these bodies, claiming certain privileges, are forced in

spite of themselves to open onto something that exceeds them, a short revo-

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lutionary instant, an experimental surge. A confused situation: each time it

occurs, it is necessary to analyze tendencies and poles, the nature of the

movements. All of a sudden, it is as if the collective body of the notary pub-

lics were advancing like Arabs or Indians, then regrouping and reorganiz-

ing: a comic opera where you never know what is going to happen next

(even the cry "The police are with us!" is sometimes heard).

Husserl speaks of a protogeometry that addresses vague, in other words,

vagabond or nomadic, morphological essences. These essences are distinct

from sensible things, as well as from ideal, royal, or imperial essences.

Protogeometry, the science dealing with them, is itself vague, in the etymo-

logical sense of "vagabond": it is neither inexact like sensible things nor

exact like ideal essences, but anexactyet rigorous ("essentially and not acci-

dentally inexact"). The circle is an organic, ideal, fixed essence, but round-

ness is a vague and fluent essence, distinct both from the circle and things

that are round (a vase, a wheel, the sun). A theorematic figure is a fixed

essence, but its transformations, distortions, ablations, and augmentations,

all of its variations, form problematic figures that are vague yet rigorous,

"lens-shaped," "umbelliform," or "indented." It could be said that vague

essences extract from things a determination that is more than thinghood
(choseite), which is that of corporeality (corporeite), and which perhaps

even implies an esprit de corps.

But why does Husserl see this as a

protogeometry, a kind of halfway point and not a pure science? Why does

he make pure essences dependent upon a passage to the limit, when any

passage to the limit belongs as such to the vague? What we have, rather, are

two formally different conceptions of science, and, ontologically, a single

field of interaction in which royal science continually appropriates the

contents of vague or nomad science while nomad science continually cuts

the contents of royal science loose. At the limit, all that counts is the con-

stantly shifting borderline. In Husserl (and also in Kant, though in the

opposite direction: roundness as the "schema" of the circle), we find a very

accurate appreciation of the irreducibility of nomad science, but simulta-

neously the concern of a man of the State, or one who sides with the State,

to maintain a legislative and constituent primacy for royal science. When-

ever this primacy is taken for granted, nomad science is portrayed as a

prescientific or parascientific or subscientific agency. And most impor-

tant, it becomes impossible to understand the relations between science

and technology, science and practice, because nomad science is not a sim-

ple technology or practice, but a scientific field in which the problem of

these relations is brought out and resolved in an entirely different way than

from the point of view of royal science. The State is perpetually producing

and reproducing ideal circles, but a war machine is necessary to make

something round. Thus the specific characteristics of nomad science are

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what need to be determined in order to understand both the repression it

encounters and the interaction "containing" it.

Nomad science does not have the same relation to work as royal science.

Not that the division of labor in nomad science is any less thorough; it is

different. We know of the problems States have always had with journey-

men's associations, or compagnonnages, the nomadic or itinerant bodies

of the type formed by masons, carpenters, smiths, etc. Settling,

seden-tarizing labor power, regulating the movement of the flow of labor,

assigning it channels and conduits, forming corporations in the sense of

organisms, and, for the rest, relying on forced manpower recruited on the

spot (corvee) or among indigents (charity workshops)—this has always

been one of the principal affairs of the State, which undertook to conquer

both a band vagabondage and a body nomadism. Let us return to the exam-

ple of Gothic architecture for a reminder of how extensively the journey-

men traveled, building cathedrals near and far, scattering construction

sites across the land, drawing on an active and passive power (mobility and

the strike) that was far from convenient for the State. The State's response

was to take over management of the construction sites, merging all the divi-

sions of labor in the supreme distinction between the intellectual and the

manual, the theoretical and the practical, modeled upon the difference

between "governors" and "governed." In the nomad sciences, as in the

royal sciences, we find the existence of a "plane," but not at all in the same

way. The ground-level plane of the Gothic journeyman is opposed to the

metric plane of the architect, which is on paper and off site. The plane of

consistency or composition is opposed to another plane, that of organiza-

tion or formation. Stone cutting by squaring is opposed to stone cutting

using templates, which implies the erection of a model for reproduction. It

can be said not only that there is no longer a need for skilled or qualified

labor, but also that there is a need for unskilled or unqualified labor, for a

dequalification of labor. The State does not give power (pouvoir) to the

intellectuals or conceptual innovators; on the contrary, it makes them a

strictly dependent organ with an autonomy that is only imagined yet is suf-

ficient to divest those whose job it becomes simply to reproduce or imple-

ment of all of their power (puissance). This does not shield the State from

more trouble, this time with the body of intellectuals it itself engendered,

but which asserts new nomadic and political claims. In any case, if the State

always finds it necessary to repress the nomad and minor sciences, if it

opposes vague essences and the operative geometry of the trait, it does so

not because the content of these sciences is inexact or imperfect, or because

of their magic or initiatory character, but because they imply a division of

labor opposed to the norms of the State. The difference is not extrinsic: the

way in which a science, or a conception of science, participates in the

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organization of the social field, and in particular induces a division of

labor, is part of that science itself. Royal science is inseparable from a

"hylomorphic" model implying both a form that organizes matter and a

matter prepared for the form; it has often been shown that this schema

derives less from technology or life than from a society divided into gover-

nors and governed, and later, intellectuals and manual laborers. What

characterizes it is that all matter is assigned to content, while all form

passes into expression. It seems that nomad science is more immediately in

tune with the connection between content and expression in themselves,

each of these two terms encompassing both form and matter. Thus matter,

in nomad science, is never prepared and therefore homogenized matter,

but is essentially laden with singularities (which constitute a form of con-

tent). And neither is expression formal; it is inseparable from pertinent

traits (which constitute a matter of expression). This is an entirely different

schema, as we shall see. We can get a preliminary idea of this situation by

recalling the most general characteristic of nomad art, in which a dynamic

connection between support and ornament replaces the matter-form dia-

lectic. From the point of view of nomad science, which presents itself as an

art as much as a technique, the division of labor fully exists, but it does not

employ the form-matter duality (even in the case of biunivocal corre-

spondences). Rather, it follows the connections between singularities of

matter and traits of expression, and lodges on the level of these connec-

tions, whether they be natural or forced.

This is another organization of

work and of the social field through work.

It is instructive to contrast two models of science, after the manner of

Plato in the Timaeus.

One could be called Compars and the other

Dispars. The compars is the legal or legalist model employed by royal sci-

ence. The search for laws consists in extracting constants, even if those con-

stants are only relations between variables (equations). An invariable form

for variables, a variable matter of the invariant: such is the foundation of

the hylomorphic schema. But for the dispars as an element of nomad sci-

ence the relevant distinction is material-forces rather than matter-form.

Here, it is not exactly a question of extracting constants from variables but

of placing the variables themselves in a state of continuous variation. If

there are still equations, they are adequations, inequations, differential

equations irreducible to the algebraic form and inseparable from a sensible

intuition of variation. They seize or determine singularities in the matter,

instead of constituting a general form. They effect individuations through

events or haecceities, not through the "object" as a compound of matter

and form; vague essences are nothing other than haecceities. In all these

respects, there is an opposition between the logos and the nomos, the law

and the nomos, prompting the comment that the law still "savors of

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morality."

This does not mean, however, that the legal model knows noth-

ing of forces, the play of forces. That it does is evident in the homogeneous

space corresponding to the compars. Homogeneous space is in no way a

smooth space; on the contrary, it is the form of striated space. The space of
pillars. It is striated by the fall of bodies, the verticals of gravity, the distri-

bution of matter into parallel layers, the lamellar and laminar movement

of flows. These parallel verticals have formed an independent dimension

capable of spreading everywhere, of formalizing all the other dimensions,

of striating all of space in all of its directions, so as to render it homoge-

neous. The vertical distance between two points provided the mode of

comparison for the horizontal distance between two other points. Univer-

sal attraction became the law of all laws, in that it set the rule for the

biunivocal correspondence between two bodies; and each time science dis-

covered a new field, it sought to formalize it in the same mode as the field of

gravity. Even chemistry became a royal science only by virtue of a whole

theoretical elaboration of the notion of weight. Euclidean space is founded

on the famous parallel postulate, but the parallels in question are in the

first place gravitational parallels, and correspond to the forces exerted by

gravity on all the elements of a body presumed to fill that space. It is the

point of application of the resultant of all of these parallel forces that

remains invariable when their common direction is changed or the body is

rotated (the center of gravity). In short, it seems that the force of gravity lies

at the basis of a laminar, striated, homogeneous, and centered space; it

forms the foundation for those multiplicities termed metric, or

arborescent, whose dimensions are independent of the situation and are

expressed with the aid of units and points (movements from one point to

another). It was not some metaphysical concern, but an effectively scien-

tific one, that frequently led scientists in the nineteenth century to ask if all

forces were not reducible to gravity, or rather to the form of attraction that

gives gravity a universal value (a constant relation for all variables) and

biunivocal scope (two bodies at a time, and no more). It is the form of

interiority of all science.

The nomos, or the dispars, is altogether different. But this is not to say

that the other forces refute gravity or contradict attraction. Although it is

true that they do not go against them, they do not result from them either;

they do not depend on them but testify to events that are always supple-

mentary or of "variable affects." Each time a new field opened up in

science—under conditions making this a far more important notion than

that of form or object—it proved irreducible to the field of attraction and

the model of the gravitational forces, although not contradictory to them.

It affirmed a "more" or an excess, and lodged itself in that excess, that devi-

ation. When chemistry took a decisive step forward, it was always by add-

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ing to the force of weight bonds of another type (for example, electric) that

transformed the nature of chemical equations.

But it will be noted that

the simplest considerations of velocity immediately introduce the differ-

ence between vertical descent and curvilinear motion, or more generally

between the straight line and the curve, in the differential form of the

clinamen, or the smallest deviation, the minimum excess. Smooth space is

precisely the space of the smallest deviation: therefore it has no homogene-

ity, except between infinitely proximate points, and the linking of proximi-

ties is effected independently of any determined path. It is a space of

contact, of small tactile or manual actions of contact, rather than a visual

space like Euclid's striated space. Smooth space is a field without conduits

or channels. A field, a heterogeneous smooth space, is wedded to a very

particular type of multiplicity: nonmetric, acentered, rhizomatic multipli-

cities that occupy space without "counting" it and can "be explored only by

legwork." They do not meet the visual condition of being observable from a

point in space external to them; an example of this is the system of sounds,

or even of colors, as opposed to Euclidean space.

When we oppose speed and slowness, the quick and the weighty,

Celeritas and Gravitas, this must not be seen as a quantitative opposition,

or as a mythological structure (although Dumezil has established the myth-

ological importance of this opposition, precisely in relation to the State

apparatus and its natural "gravity"). The opposition is both qualitative

and scientific, in that speed is not merely an abstract characteristic of

movement in general but is incarnated in a moving body that deviates,

however slightly, from its line of descent or gravity. Slow and rapid are not
quantitative degrees of movement but rather two types of qualified move-
ment, whatever the speed of the former or the tardiness of the latter.

Strictly speaking, it cannot be said that a body that is dropped has a speed,

however fast it falls; rather it has an infinitely decreasing slowness in accor-

dance with the law of falling bodies. Laminar movement that striates

space, that goes from one point to another, is weighty; but rapidity, celerity,

applies only to movement that deviates to the minimum extent and there-

after assumes a vortical motion, occupying a smooth space, actually draw-

ing smooth space itself. In this space, matter-flow can no longer be cut into

parallel layers, and movement no longer allows itself to be hemmed into

biunivocal relations between points. In this sense, the role of the qualita-

tive opposition gravity-celerity, heavy-light, slow-rapid is not that of a

quantifiable scientific determination but of a condition that is coextensive

to science and that regulates both the separation and the mixing of the two

models, their possible interpenetration, the domination of one by the

other, their alternative. And the best formulation, that of Michel Serres, is

indeed couched in terms of an alternative, whatever mixes or composi-

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tions there may be: "Physics is reducible to two sciences, a general theory of

routes and paths, and a global theory of waves."

A distinction must be made between two types of science, or scientific

procedures: one consists in "reproducing," the other in "following." The

first involves reproduction, iteration and reiteration; the other, involving

itineration, is the sum of the itinerant, ambulant sciences. Itineration is too

readily reduced to a modality of technology, or of the application and veri-

fication of science. But this is not the case: following is not at all the same
thing as reproducing, and one never follows in order to reproduce. The

ideal of reproduction, deduction, or induction is part of royal science, at all

times and in all places, and treats differences of time and place as so many

variables, the constant form of which is extracted precisely by the law: for

the same phenomena to recur in a gravitational and striated space it is suf-

ficient for the same conditions to obtain, or for the same constant relation

to hold between the differing conditions and the variable phenomena.

Reproducing implies the permanence of a fixed point of view that is exter-

nal to what is reproduced: watching the flow from the bank. But following

is something different from the ideal of reproduction. Not better, just dif-

ferent. One is obliged to follow when one is in search of the "singularities"

of a matter, or rather of a material, and not out to discover a form; when

one escapes the force of gravity to enter a field of celerity; when one ceases

to contemplate the course of a laminar flow in a determinate direction, to

be carried away by a vortical flow; when one engages in a continuous varia-

tion of variables, instead of extracting constants from them, etc. And the

meaning of Earth completely changes: with the legal model, one is con-

stantly reterritorializing around a point of view, on a domain, according to

a set of constant relations; but with the ambulant model, the process of

deterritorialization constitutes and extends the territory itself. "Go first to

your old plant and watch carefully the watercourse made by the rain. By

now the rain must have carried the seeds far away. Watch the crevices made

by the runoff, and from them determine the direction of the flow. Then

find the plant that is growing at the farthest point from your plant. All the

devil's weed plants that are growing in between are yours. Later. . . you can

extend the size of your territory."

There are itinerant, ambulant sciences

that consist in following a flow in a vectorial field across which singularities
are scattered like so many "accidents" (problems). For example, why is

primitive metallurgy necessarily an ambulant science that confers upon

smiths a quasi-nomadic status? It could be objected that in these examples

it is still a question of going from one point to another (even if they are sin-

gular points) through the intermediary of channels, and that it is still possi-

ble to cut the flow into layers. But this is only true to the extent that

ambulant procedures and processes are necessarily tied to a striated

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space—always formalized by royal science—which deprives them of their

model, submits them to its own model, and allows them to exist only in the

capacity of "technologies" or "applied science." As a general rule, a smooth

space, a vectorial field, a nonmetric multiplicity are always translatable,

and necessarily translated, into a "compars": a fundamental operation by

which one repeatedly overlays upon each point of smooth space a tangent

Euclidean space endowed with a sufficient number of dimensions, by

which one reintroduces parallelism between two vectors, treating multipli-

city as though it were immersed in this homogeneous and striated space of

reproduction, instead of continuing to follow it in an "exploration by

leg-work."

This is the triumph of the logos or the law over the nomos. But

the complexity of the operation testifies to the existence of resistances it

must overcome. Whenever ambulant procedure and process are returned

to their own model, the points regain their position as singularities that

exclude all biunivocal relations, the flow regains its curvilinear and

vortical motion that excludes any parallelism between vectors, and smooth

space reconquers the properties of contact that prevent it from remaining

homogeneous and striated. There is always a current preventing the ambu-

lant or itinerant sciences from being completely internalized in the repro-

ductive royal sciences. There is a type of ambulant scientist whom State

scientists are forever fighting or integrating or allying with, even going so

far as to propose a minor position for them within the legal system of sci-

ence and technology.

It is not that the ambulant sciences are more saturated with irrational

procedures, with mystery and magic. They only get that way when they fall

into abeyance. And the royal sciences, for their part, also surround them-

selves with much priestliness and magic. Rather, what becomes apparent

in the rivalry between the two models is that the ambulant or nomad sci-

ences do not destine science to take on an autonomous power, or even to

have an autonomous development. They do not have the means for that

because they subordinate all their operations to the sensible conditions of

intuition and construction—following the flow of matter, drawing and
linking up smooth space. Everything is situated in an objective zone of

fluctuation that is coextensive with reality itself. However refined or rigor-

ous, "approximate knowledge" is still dependent upon sensitive and sensi-

ble evaluations that pose more problems than they solve: problematics is

still its only mode. In contrast, what is proper to royal science, to its

theorematic or axiomatic power, is to isolate all operations from the condi-

tions of intuition, making them true intrinsic concepts, or "categories."

That is precisely why deterritorialization, in this kind of science, implies a

reterritorialization in the conceptual apparatus. Without this categorical,

apodictic apparatus, the differential operations would be constrained to

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follow the evolution of a phenomenon; what is more, since the experimen-

tation would be open-air, and the construction at ground level, the coordi-

nates permitting them to be erected as stable models would never become

available. Certain of these requirements are translated in terms of "safety":

the two cathedrals at Orleans and Beauvais collapsed at the end of the

twelfth century, and control calculations are difficult to effect for the con-

structions of ambulant science. Although safety is a fundamental element

in the theoretical norms of the State, and of the political ideal, there is also

something else at issue as well. Due to all their procedures, the ambulant

sciences quickly overstep the possibility of calculation: they inhabit that

"more" that exceeds the space of reproduction and soon run into problems

that are insurmountable from that point of view; they eventually resolve

those problems by means of a real-life operation. The solutions are sup-

posed to come from a set of activities that constitute them as

nonautono-mous. Only royal science, in contrast, has at its disposal a metric

power that can define a conceptual apparatus or an autonomy of science

(including the autonomy of experimental science). That is why it is

necessary to couple ambulant spaces with a space of homogeneity, without

which the laws of physics would depend on particular points in space. But

this is less a translation than a constitution: precisely that constitution the

ambulant sciences did not undertake, and do not have the means to

undertake. In the field of interaction of the two sciences, the ambulant

sciences confine themselves to inventing problems whose solution is tied

to a whole set of collective, nonscientific activities but whose scientific
solution depends, on the contrary, on royal science and the way it has

transformed the problem by introducing it into its theorematic apparatus

and its organization of work. This is somewhat like intuition and

intelligence in Bergson, where only intelligence has the scientific means

to solve formally the problems posed by intuition, problems that intuition

would be content to entrust to the qualitative activities of a humanity

engaged in following matter.

ROBLEM

II. Is there a way to extricate thought from the State model?

ROPOSITION

IV. The exteriority of the war machine is attested to,

finally, by noology.

Thought contents are sometimes criticized for being too conformist.

But the primary question is that of form itself. Thought as such is already in

conformity with a model that it borrows from the State apparatus, and

which defines for it goals and paths, conduits, channels, organs, an entire
organon. There is thus an image of thought covering all of thought; it is the

special object of "noology" and is like the State-form developed in thought.

This image has two heads, corresponding to the two poles of sovereignty:

the imperium of true thinking operating by magical capture, seizure or

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binding, constituting the efficacy of a foundation {mythos); a republic of

free spirits proceeding by pact or contract, constituting a legislative and

juridical organization, carrying the sanction of a ground (logos). These two

heads are in constant interference in the classical image of thought: a

"republic of free spirits whose prince would be the idea of the Supreme

Being." And if these two heads are in interference, it is not only because

there are many intermediaries and transitions between them, and because

the first prepares the way for the second and the second uses and retains the

first, but also because, antithetical and complementary, they are necessary

to one another. It is not out of the question, however, that in order to pass

from one to the other there must occur, "between" them, an event of an

entirely different nature, one that hides outside the image, takes place out-

side.

But confining ourselves to the image, it appears that it is not simply a

metaphor when we are told of an imperium of truth and a republic of spirits.

It is the necessary condition for the constitution of thought as principle, or

as a form of interiority, as a stratum.

It is easy to see what thought gains from this: a gravity it would never

have on its own, a center that makes everything, including the State, appear

to exist by its own efficacy or on its own sanction. But the State gains just as

much. Indeed, by developing in thought in this way the State-form gains

something essential: a whole consensus. Only thought is capable of invent-

ing the fiction of a State that is universal by right, of elevating the State to

the level of de jure universality. It is as if the sovereign were left alone in the

world, spanned the entire ecumenon, and now dealt only with actual or

potential subjects. It is no longer a question of powerful, extrinsic organiza-

tions, or of strange bands: the State becomes the sole principle separating

rebel subjects, who are consigned to the state of nature, from consenting

subjects, who rally to its form of their own accord. If it is advantageous for

thought to prop itself up with the State, it is no less advantageous for the

State to extend itself in thought, and to be sanctioned by it as the unique,

universal form. The particularity of States becomes merely an accident of

fact, as is their possible perversity, or their imperfection. For the modern

State defines itself in principle as "the rational and reasonable organiza-

tion of a community": the only remaining particularity a community has is

interior or moral (the spirit of a people), at the same time as the community

is funneled by its organization toward the harmony of a universal (absolute
spirit). The State gives thought a form of interiority, and thought gives that

interiority a form of universality: "The goal of worldwide organization is

the satisfaction of reasonable individuals within particular free States."

The exchange that takes place between the State and reason is a curious

one; but that exchange is also an analytic proposition, because realized rea-

son is identified with the de jure State, just as the State is the becoming of

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reason.

In so-called modern philosophy, and in the so-called modern or

rational State, everything revolves around the legislator and the subject.

The State must realize the distinction between the legislator and the sub-

ject under formal conditions permitting thought, for its part, to conceptu-

alize their identity. Always obey. The more you obey, the more you will be

master, for you will only be obeying pure reason, in other words yourself...

Ever since philosophy assigned itself the role of ground it has been giving

the established powers its blessing, and tracing its doctrine of faculties onto

the organs of State power. Common sense, the unity of all the faculties at

the center constituted by the Cogito, is the State consensus raised to the

absolute. This was most notably the great operation of the Kantian "cri-

tique," renewed and developed by Hegelianism. Kant was constantly criti-

cizing bad usages, the better to consecrate the function. It is not at all

surprising that the philosopher has become a public professor or State

functionary. It was all over the moment the State-form inspired an image of

thought. With full reciprocity. Doubtless, the image itself assumes differ-

ent contours in accordance with the variations on this form: it has not

always delineated or designated the philosopher, and will not always delin-

eate him. It is possible to pass from a magical function to a rational func-

tion. The poet in the archaic imperial State was able to play the role of

image trainer.

In modern States, the sociologist succeeded in replacing

the philosopher (as, for example, when Durkheim and his disciples set out

to give the republic a secular model of thought). Even today, psychoanaly-

sis lays claim to the role of Cogitatio universalis as the thought of the Law,

in a magical return. And there are quite a few other competitors and pre-

tenders. Noology, which is distinct from ideology, is precisely the study of

images of thought, and their historicity. In a sense, it could be said that all

this has no importance, that thought has never had anything but laughable

gravity. But that is all it requires: for us not to take it seriously. Because that

makes it all the easier for it to think for us, and to be forever engendering

new functionaries. Because the less people take thought seriously, the more

they think in conformity with what the State wants. Truly, what man of the

State has not dreamed of that paltry impossible thing—to be a thinker?

But noology is confronted by counterthoughts, which are violent in their

acts and discontinuous in their appearances, and whose existence is mobile

in history. These are the acts of a "private thinker," as opposed to the public

professor: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, or even Shestov. Wherever they dwell,

it is the steppe or the desert. They destroy images. Nietzsche's Schopen-
hauer as Educator is perhaps the greatest critique ever directed against the

image of thought and its relation to the State. "Private thinker," however, is

not a satisfactory expression, because it exaggerates interiority, when it is a

question of outside thought.

To place thought in an immediate relation

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with the outside, with the forces of the outside, in short to make thought a

war machine, is a strange undertaking whose precise procedures can be

studied in Nietzsche (the aphorism, for example, is very different from the

maxim, for a maxim, in the republic of letters, is like an organic State act or

sovereign judgment, whereas an aphorism always awaits its meaning from

a new external force, a final force that must conquer or subjugate it, utilize

it). There is another reason why "private thinker" is not a good expression.

Although it is true that this counterthought attests to an absolute solitude,

it is an extremely populous solitude, like the desert itself, a solitude already

intertwined with a people to come, one that invokes and awaits that people,

existing only through it, though it is not yet here. "We are lacking that final

force, in the absence of a people to bear us. We are looking for that popular

support." Every thought is already a tribe, the opposite of a State. And this

form of exteriority of thought is not at all symmetrical to the form of

interiority. Strictly speaking, symmetry exists only between different poles

or focal points of interiority. But the form of exteriority of thought—the

force that is always external to itself, or the final force, the «th power—is

not at all another image in opposition to the image inspired by the State

apparatus. It is, rather, a force that destroys both the image and its copies,

the model and its reproductions, every possibility of subordinating

thought to a model of the True, the Just, or the Right (Cartesian truth,

Kantian just, Hegelian right, etc.). A "method" is the striated space of the
cogitatio universalis and draws a path that must be followed from one point

to another. But the form of exteriority situates thought in a smooth space

that it must occupy without counting, and for which there is no possible

method, no conceivable reproduction, but only relays, intermezzos, resur-

gences. Thought is like the Vampire; it has no image, either to constitute a

model of or to copy. In the smooth space of Zen, the arrow does not go from

one point to another but is taken up at any point, to be sent to any other

point, and tends to permute with the archer and the target. The problem of

the war machine is that of relaying, even with modest means, not that of the

architectonic model or the monument. An ambulant people of relayers,

rather than a model society. "Nature propels the philosopher into mankind

like an arrow; it takes no aim but hopes the arrow will stick somewhere. But

countless times it misses and is depressed at the fact.... The artist and the

philosopher are evidence against the purposiveness of nature as regards the

means it employs, though they are also first-rate evidence as to the wisdom

of its purpose. They strike home at only a few, while they ought to strike

home at everybody—and even these few are not struck with the force with

which the philosopher and artist launch their shot."

We have in mind in particular two pathetic texts, in the sense that in them

thought is truly a pathos (an antilogos and an antimythos). One is a

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text by Artaud, in his letters to Jacques Riviere, explaining that thought

operates on the basis of a central breakdown, that it lives solely by its own

incapacity to take on form, bringing into relief only traits of expression in a

material, developing peripherally, in a pure milieu of exteriority, as a func-

tion of singularities impossible to universalize, of circumstances impossi-

ble to interiorize. The other is the text by Kleist, "On the Gradual

Formation of Ideas in Speech" ("Uber die allmachliche Verfertigung der

Gedanken beim Reden"), in which Kleist denounces the central interiority

of the concept as a means of control—the control of speech, of language,

but also of affects, circumstances and even chance. He distinguishes this

from thought as a proceeding and a process, a bizarre anti-Platonic dia-

logue, an antidialogue between brother and sister where one speaks before

knowing while the other relays before having understood: this, Kleist says,

is the thought of the Gemut, which proceeds like a general in a war machine

should, or like a body charged with electricity, with pure intensity. "I mix

inarticulate sounds, lengthen transitional terms, as well as using apposi-

tions when they are unnecessary." Gain some time, and then perhaps

renounce, or wait. The necessity of not having control over language, of

being a foreigner in one's own tongue, in order to draw speech to oneself

and "bring something incomprehensible into the world." Such is the form

of exteriority, the relation between brother and sister, the

becoming-woman of the thinker, the becoming-thought of the woman: the
Gemut that refuses to be controlled, that forms a war machine. A thought

grappling with exterior forces instead of being gathered up in an interior

form, operating by relays instead of forming an image; an event-thought, a

haecceity, instead of a subject-thought, a problem-thought instead of an

essence-thought or theorem; a thought that appeals to a people instead of

taking itself for a government ministry. Is it by chance that whenever a

"thinker" shoots an arrow, there is a man of the State, a shadow or an image

of a man of the State, that counsels and admonishes him, and wants to

assign him a target or "aim"? Jacques Riviere does not hesitate to respond

to Artaud: work at it, keep on working, things will come out all right, you

will succeed in finding a method and in learning to express clearly what

you think in essence (cogitatio universalis). Riviere is not a head of State,

but he would not be the last in the Nouvelle Revue Francaise to mistake

himself for the secret prince in a republic of letters or the gray eminence in a

State of right. Lenz and Kleist confronted Goethe, that grandiose genius, of

all men of letters a veritable man of the State. But that is not the worst of it:

the worst is the way the texts of Kleist and Artaud themselves have ended

up becoming monuments, inspiring a model to be copied—a model far

more insidious than the others—for the artificial stammerings and

innumerable tracings that claim to be their equal.

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The classical image of thought, and the striating of mental space it

effects, aspires to universality. It in effect operates with two "universals,"

the Whole as the final ground of being or all-encompassing horizon, and

the Subject as the principle that converts being into being-for-us.

Im-perium and republic. Between the two, all of the varieties of the real and

the true find their place in a striated mental space, from the double point

of view of Being and the Subject, under the direction of a "universal

method." It is now easy for us to characterize the nomad thought that

rejects this image and does things differently. It does not ally itself with a

universal thinking subject but, on the contrary, with a singular race; and it

does not ground itself in an all-encompassing totality but is on the

contrary deployed in a horizonless milieu that is a smooth space, steppe,

desert, or sea. An entirely different type of adequation is established here,

between the race defined as "tribe" and smooth space defined as "milieu."

A tribe in the desert instead of a universal subject within the horizon of

all-encompassing Being. Kenneth White recently stressed this

dissymmetrical complementarity between a race-tribe (the Celts, those

who feel they are Celts) and a milieu-space (the Orient, the Gobi

desert...). White demonstrates that this strange composite, the marriage of

the Celt and the Orient, inspires a properly nomad thought that sweeps up

English literature and constitutes American literature.

We immediately

see the dangers, the profound ambiguities accompanying in this

enterprise, as if each effort and each creation faced a possible infamy. For

what can be done to prevent the theme of a race from turning into a

racism, a dominant and all-encompassing fascism, or into a sect and a

folklore, microfascisms? And what can be done to prevent the oriental

pole from becoming a phantasy that reactivates all the fascisms in a

different way, and also all the folklores, yoga, Zen, and karate? It is

certainly not enough to travel to escape phantasy, and it is certainly not by

invoking a past, real or mythical, that one avoids racism. But here again,

the criteria for making the distinction are simple, whatever the de facto

mixes that obscure them at a given level, at a given moment. The race-tribe

exists only at the level of an oppressed race, and in the name of the

oppression it suffers: there is no race but inferior, minoritarian; there is

no dominant race; a race is defined not by its purity but rather by the

impurity conferred upon it by a system of domination. Bastard and

mixed-blood are the true names of race. Rimbaud said it all on this point:

only he or she can invoke race who says, "I have always been of an inferior

race... I am of an inferior race for all eternity. . . There I am on the Breton

shore ... I am a beast, a nigger . . . I am of a distant race: my ancestors were

Norsemen."

In the same way that race is not something to be rediscovered,

the Orient is not something to be imitated: it only exists in the construction

of a smooth space, just as race only exists in the constitu-

380 □ 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

tion of a tribe that peoples and traverses a smooth space. All of thought is a

becoming, a double becoming, rather than the attribute of a Subject and

the representation of a Whole.

XIOM

II. The war machine is the invention of the nomads (insofar as it is

exterior to the State apparatus and distinct from the military institu-
tion). As such, the war machine has three aspects, a spatiogeographic
aspect, an arithmetic or algebraic aspect, and an affective aspect.

ROPOSITION

V. Nomad existence necessarily effectuates the conditions

of the war machine in space.

The nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths; he goes from

one point to another; he is not ignorant of points (water points, dwelling

points, assembly points, etc.). But the question is what in nomad life is a

principle and what is only a consequence. To begin with, although the

points determine paths, they are strictly subordinated to the paths they

determine, the reverse of what happens with the sedentary. The water

point is reached only in order to be left behind; every point is a relay and

exists only as a relay. A path is always between two points, but the in-bet-

ween has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a

direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo. Even the ele-

ments of his dwelling are conceived in terms of the trajectory that is for-

ever mobilizing them.

The nomad is not at all the same as the migrant;

for the migrant goes principally from one point to another, even if the sec-

ond point is uncertain, unforeseen, or not well localized. But the nomad

goes from point to point only as a consequence and as a factual necessity;

in principle, points for him are relays along a trajectory. Nomads and

migrants can mix in many ways, or form a common aggregate; their

causes and conditions are no less distinct for that (for example, those who

joined Mohammed at Medina had a choice between a nomadic or bedouin

pledge, and a pledge of hegira or emigration).

Second, even though the nomadic trajectory may follow trails or cus-

tomary routes, it does not fulfill the function of the sedentary road, which

is to parcel out a closed space to people, assigning each person a share and

regulating the communication between shares. The nomadic trajectory

does the opposite: it distributes people (or animals) in an open space, one

that is indefinite and noncommunicating. The nomos came to designate

the law, but that was originally because it was distribution, a mode of distri-

bution. It is a very special kind of distribution, one without division into

shares, in a space without borders or enclosure. The nomos is the consis-

tency of a fuzzy aggregate: it is in this sense that it stands in opposition to

the law or the polls, as the backcountry, a mountainside, or the vague

expanse around a city ("either nomos or polis").

Therefore, and this is the

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third point, there is a significant difference between the spaces: sedentary

space is striated, by walls, enclosures, and roads between enclosures, while

nomad space is smooth, marked only by "traits" that are effaced and dis-

placed with the trajectory. Even the lamellae of the desert slide over each

other, producing an inimitable sound. The nomad distributes himself in a

smooth space; he occupies, inhabits, holds that space; that is his territorial

principle. It is therefore false to define the nomad by movement. Toynbee

is profoundly right to suggest that the nomad is on the contrary he who does
not move. Whereas the migrant leaves behind a milieu that has become

amorphous or hostile, the nomad is one who does not depart, does not want

to depart, who clings to the smooth space left by the receding forest, where

the steppe or the desert advances, and who invents nomadism as a response

to this challenge.

Of course, the nomad moves, but while seated, and he is

only seated while moving (the Bedouin galloping, knees on the saddle, sit-

ting on the soles of his upturned feet, "a feat of balance"). The nomad

knows how to wait, he has infinite patience. Immobility and speed, catato-

nia and rush, a "stationary process," station as process—these traits of

Kleist's are eminently those of the nomad. It is thus necessary to make a

distinction between speed and movement: a movement may be very fast,

but that does not give it speed; a speed may be very slow, or even immobile,

yet it is still speed. Movement is extensive; speed is intensive. Movement

designates the relative character of a body considered as "one," and which

goes from point to point; speed, on the contrary, constitutes the absolute
character of a body whose irreducible parts (atoms) occupy or fill a smooth
space in the manner of a vortex, with the possibility of springing up at any

point. (It is therefore not surprising that reference has been made to spiri-

tual voyages effected without relative movement, but in intensity, in one

place: these are part of nomadism.) In short, we will say by convention that

only nomads have absolute movement, in other words, speed; vortical or

swirling movement is an essential feature of their war machine.

It is in this sense that nomads have no points, paths, or land, even though

they do by all appearances. If the nomad can be called the Deterritorialized

par excellence, it is precisely because there is no reterritorialization after-
wardas with the migrant, or upon something else as with the sedentary (the

sedentary's relation with the earth is mediatized by something else, a prop-

erty regime, a State apparatus). With the nomad, on the contrary, it is

deterritorialization that constitutes the relation to the earth, to such a

degree that the nomad reterritorializes on deterritorialization itself. It is

the earth that deterritorializes itself, in a way that provides the nomad with

a territory. The land ceases to be land, tending to become simply ground
(sol) or support. The earth does not become deterritorialized in its global

and relative movement, but at specific locations, at the spot where the for-

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est recedes, or where the steppe and the desert advance. Hubac is right to

say that nomadism is explainable less by universal changes in climate

(which relate instead to migrations) as by the "divagation of local cli-

mates."

The nomads are there, on the land, wherever there forms a

smooth space that gnaws, and tends to grow, in all directions. The nomads

inhabit these places; they remain in them, and they themselves make them

grow, for it has been established that the nomads make the desert no less

than they are made by it. They are vectors of deterritorialization. They add

desert to desert, steppe to steppe, by a series of local operations whose ori-

entation and direction endlessly vary.

The sand desert has not only oases,

which are like fixed points, but also rhizomatic vegetation that is tempo-

rary and shifts location according to local rains, bringing changes in the

direction of the crossings.

The same terms are used to describe ice deserts

as sand deserts: there is no line separating earth and sky; there is no inter-

mediate distance, no perspective or contour; visibility is limited; and yet

there is an extraordinarily fine topology that relies not on points or objects

but rather on haecceities, on sets of relations (winds, undulations of snow

or sand, the song of the sand or the creaking of ice, the tactile qualities of

both). It is a tactile space, or rather "haptic," a sonorous much more than a

visual space.

The variability, the polyvocality of directions, is an essential

feature of smooth spaces of the rhizome type, and it alters their cartogra-

phy. The nomad, nomad space, is localized and not delimited. What is both

limited and limiting is striated space, the relative global: it is limited in its

parts, which are assigned constant directions, are oriented in relation to

one another, divisible by boundaries, and can interlink; what is limiting
{limes or wall, and no longer boundary) is this aggregate in relation to the

smooth spaces it "contains," whose growth it slows or prevents, and which

it restricts or places outside. Even when the nomad sustains its effects, he

does not belong to this relative global, where one passes from one point to

another, from one region to another. Rather, he is in a local absolute, an

absolute that is manifested locally, and engendered in a series of local oper-

ations of varying orientations: desert, steppe, ice, sea.

Making the absolute appear in a particular place—is that not a very gen-

eral characteristic of religion (recognizing that the nature of the appear-

ance, and the legitimacy, or lack thereof, of the images that reproduce it are

open to debate)? But the sacred place of religion is fundamentally a center

that repels the obscure nomos. The absolute of religion is essentially a hori-

zon that encompasses, and, if the absolute itself appears at a particular

place, it does so in order to establish a solid and stable center for the global.

The encompassing role of smooth spaces (desert, steppe, or ocean) in

monotheism has been frequently noted. In short, religion converts the

absolute. Religion is in this sense a piece in the State apparatus (in both of

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its forms, the "bond" and the "pact or alliance"), even if it has within itself

the power to elevate this model to the level of the universal or to constitute

an absolute Imperium. But for the nomad the terms of the question are

totally different: locality is not delimited; the absolute, then, does not

appear at a particular place but becomes a nonlimited locality; the coup-

ling of the place and the absolute is achieved not in a centered, oriented

globalization or universalization but in an infinite succession of local oper-

ations. Limiting ourselves to this opposition between points of view, it may

be observed that nomads do not provide a favorable terrain for religion; the

man of war is always committing an offense against the priest or the god.

The nomads have a vague, literally vagabond "monotheism," and content

themselves with that, and with their ambulant fires. The nomads have a

sense of the absolute, but a singularly atheistic one. The universalist reli-

gions that have had dealings with nomads—Moses, Mohammed, even

Christianity with the Nestorian heresy—have always encountered prob-

lems in this regard, and have run up against what they have termed obsti-

nate impiety. These religions are not, in effect, separable from a firm and

constant orientation, from an imperial de jure State, even, and especially,

in the absence of a de facto State; they have promoted an ideal of

sedentari-zation and addressed themselves more to the migrant components

than the nomadic ones. Even early Islam favored the theme of the hegira,

or migration, over nomadism; rather, it was through certain schisms (such

as the Kharijl movement) that it won over the Arab or Berber nomads.

However, it does not exhaust the question to establish a simple opposi-

tion between two points of view, religion-nomadism. For monotheistic

religion, at the deepest level of its tendency to project a universal or spiri-

tual State over the entire ecumenon, is not without ambivalence or fringe

areas; it goes beyond even the ideal limits of the State, even the imperial

State, entering a more indistinct zone, an outside of States where it has the

possibility of undergoing a singular mutation or adaptation. We are refer-

ring to religion as an element in a war machine and the idea of holy war as

the motor of that machine. The prophet, as opposed to the state personality

of the king and the religious personality of the priest, directs the movement

by which a religion becomes a war machine or passes over to the side of

such a machine. It has often been said that Islam, and the prophet Moham-

med, performed such a conversion of religion and constituted a veritable

esprit de corps: in the formula of Georges Bataille, "early Islam, a society

reduced to the military enterprise." This is what the West invokes in order

to justify its antipathy toward Islam. Yet the Crusades were a properly

Christian adventure of this type. The prophets may very well condemn

nomad life; the war machine may very well favor the movement of

migration and the ideal of establishment; religion in general may very well

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compensate for its specific deterritorialization with a spiritual and even

physical reterritorialization, which in the case of the holy war assumes the

well-directed character of a conquest of the holy lands as the center of the

world. Despite all that, when religion sets itself up as a war machine, it

mobilizes and liberates a formidable charge of nomadism or absolute

deterritorialization; it doubles the migrant with an accompanying nomad,

or with the potential nomad the migrant is in the process of becoming; and

finally, it turns its dream of an absolute State back against the State-form.

And this turning-against is no less a part of the "essence" of religion than

that dream. The history of the Crusades is marked by the most astonishing

series of directional changes: the firm orientation toward the Holy Land as

a center to reach often seems nothing more than a pretext. But it would be

wrong to say that the play of self-interest, or economic, commercial, or

political factors, diverted the crusade from its pure path. The idea of the

crusade in itself implies this variability of directions, broken and changing,

and intrinsically possesses all these factors or all these variables from the

moment it turns religion into a war machine and simultaneously utilizes

and gives rise to the corresponding nomadism.

The necessity of main-

taining the most rigorous of distinctions between sedentaries, migrants,

and nomads does not preclude de facto mixes; on the contrary, it makes

them all the more necessary in turn. And it is impossible to think of the gen-

eral process of sedentarization that vanquished the nomads without also

envisioning the gusts of local nomadization that carried off sedentaries

and doubled migrants (notably, to the benefit of religion).

Smooth or nomad space lies between two striated spaces: that of the for-

est, with its gravitational verticals, and that of agriculture, with its grids

and generalized parallels, its now independent arborescence, its art of

extracting the tree and wood from the forest. But being "between" also

means that smooth space is controlled by these two flanks, which limit it,

oppose its development, and assign it as much as possible a

communica-tional role; or, on the contrary, it means that it turns against

them, gnawing away at the forest on one side, on the other side gaining

ground on the cultivated lands, affirming a noncommunicating force or a

force of divergence like a "wedge" digging in. The nomads turn first

against the forest and the mountain dwellers, then descend upon the

farmers. What we have here is something like the flipside or the outside

of the State-form—but in what sense? This form, as a global and relative

space, implies a certain number of components: forest-clearing of fields;

agriculture-grid laying; animal raising subordinated to agricultural work

and sedentary food production; commerce based on a constellation of

town-country (polis-nomos) communications. When historians inquire

into the reasons for the victory of the West over the Orient, they primarily

mention the following characteris-

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tics, which put the Orient in general at a disadvantage: deforestation rather

than clearing for planting, making it extremely difficult to extract or even

to find wood; cultivation of the type "rice paddy and garden" rather than

arborescence and field; animal raising for the most part outside the control

of the sedentaries, with the result that they lacked animal power and meat

foods; the low communication content of the town-country relation, mak-

ing commerce far less flexible.

The conclusion is not that the State-form

is absent in the Orient. Quite to the contrary, a more rigid agency becomes

necessary in order to retain and reunite the various components plied by

escape vectors. States always have the same composition; if there is even

one truth in the political philosophy of Hegel, it is that every State carries

within itself the essential moments of its existence. States are made up not

only of people but also of wood, fields, gardens, animals, and commodities.

There is a unity of composition of all States, but States have neither the

same development nor the same organization. In the Orient, the compo-

nents are much more disconnected, disjointed, necessitating a great immu-

table Form to hold them together: "despotic formations," Asian or African,

are rocked by incessant revolts, by secessions and dynastic changes, which

nevertheless do not affect the immutability of the form. In the West, on the

other hand, the interconnectedness of the components makes possible

transformations of the State-form through revolution. It is true that the

idea of revolution itself is ambiguous; it is Western insofar as it relates to a

transformation of the State, but Eastern insofar as it envisions the destruc-

tion, the abolition of the State.

The great empires of the Orient, Africa,

and America run up against wide-open smooth spaces that penetrate them

and maintain gaps between their components (the nomos does not become

countryside, the countryside does not communicate with the town,

large-scale animal raising is the affair of the nomads, etc.): the oriental

State is in direct confrontation with a nomad war machine. This war

machine may fall back to the road of integration and proceed solely by

revolt and dynastic change; nevertheless, it is the war machine, as nomad,

that invents the abolitionist dream and reality. Western States are much

more sheltered in their striated space and consequently have much more

latitude in holding their components together; they confront the nomads

only indirectly, through the intermediary of the migrations the nomads

trigger or adopt as their stance.

One of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over

which it reigns, or to utilize smooth spaces as a means of communication in

the service of striated space. It is a vital concern of every State not only to

vanquish nomadism but to control migrations and, more generally, to

establish a zone of rights over an entire "exterior," over all of the flows

traversing the ecumenon. If it can help it, the State does not dissociate itself

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from a process of capture of flows of all kinds, populations, commodities

or commerce, money or capital, etc. There is still a need for fixed paths in

well-defined directions, which restrict speed, regulate circulation,

relativize movement, and measure in detail the relative movements of sub-

jects and objects. That is why Paul Virilio's thesis is important, when he

shows that "the political power of the State is polis, police, that is, manage-

ment of the public ways," and that "the gates of the city, its levies and

duties, are barriers, filters against the fluidity of the masses, against the

penetration power of migratory packs," people, animals, and goods.

Gravity, gravitas, such is the essence of the State. It is not at all that the

State knows nothing of speed; but it requires that movement, even the fast-

est, cease to be the absolute state of a moving body occupying a smooth

space, to become the relative characteristic of a "moved body" going from

one point to another in a striated space. In this sense, the State never ceases

to decompose, recompose, and transform movement, or to regulate speed.

The State as town surveyor, converter, or highway interchange: the role of

the engineer from this point of view. Speed and absolute movement are not

without their laws, but they are the laws of the nomos, of the smooth space

that deploys it, of the war machine that populates it. If the nomads formed

the war machine, it was by inventing absolute speed, by being "synony-

mous" with speed. And each time there is an operation against the State—

insubordination, rioting, guerrilla warfare, or revolution as act—it can be

said that a war machine has revived, that a new nomadic potential has

appeared, accompanied by the reconstitution of a smooth space or a man-

ner of being in space as though it were smooth (Virilio discusses the impor-

tance of the riot or revolutionary theme of "holding the street"). It is in this

sense that the response of the State against all that threatens to move

beyond it is to striate space. The State does not appropriate the war

machine without giving even it the form of relative movement: this was the

case with the model of the fortress as a regulator of movement, which was

precisely the obstacle the nomads came up against, the stumbling block

and parry by which absolute vortical movement was broken. Conversely,

when a State does not succeed in striating its interior or neighboring space,

the flows traversing that State necessarily adopt the stance of a war

machine directed against it, deployed in a hostile or rebellious smooth

space (even if other States are able to slip their striations in). This was the

adventure of China: toward the end of the fourteenth century, and in spite

of its very high level of technology in ships and navigation, it turned its

back on its huge maritime space, saw its commercial flows turn against it

and ally themselves with piracy, and was unable to react except by a politics

of immobility, of the massive restriction of commerce, which only

reinforced the connection between commerce and the war machine.

1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 387

The situation is much more complicated than we have let on. The sea is

perhaps principal among smooth spaces, the hydraulic model par excel-

lence. But the sea is also, of all smooth spaces, the first one attempts were

made to striate, to transform into a dependency of the land, with its fixed

routes, constant directions, relative movements, a whole counterhydraulic

of channels and conduits. One of the reasons for the hegemony of the West

was the power of its State apparatuses to striate the sea by combining the

technologies of the North and the Mediterranean and by annexing the

Atlantic. But this undertaking had the most unexpected result: the multi-

plication of relative movements, the intensification of relative speeds in

striated space, ended up reconstituting a smooth space or absolute move-

ment. As Virilio emphasizes, the sea became the place of the fleet in being,

where one no longer goes from one point to another, but rather holds space

beginning from any point: instead of striating space, one occupies it with a

vector of deterritorialization in perpetual motion. This modern strategy

was communicated from the sea to the air, as the new smooth space, but

also to the entire Earth considered as desert or sea. As converter and

capturer, the State does not just relativize movement, it reimparts absolute

movement. It does not just go from the smooth to the striated, it reconsti-

tutes smooth space; it reimparts smooth in the wake of the striated. It is

true that this new nomadism accompanies a worldwide war machine

whose organization exceeds the State apparatuses and passes into energy,

military-industrial, and multinational complexes. We say this as a

reminder that smooth space and the form of exteriority do not have an irre-

sistible revolutionary calling but change meaning drastically depending on

the interactions they are part of and the concrete conditions of their exer-

cise or establishment (for example, the way in which total war and popular

war, and even guerrilla warfare, borrow one another's methods).

ROPOSITION

VI. Nomad existence necessarily implies the numerical

elements of a war machine.

Tens, hundreds, thousands, myriads: all armies retain these decimal

groupings, to the point that each time they are encountered it is safe to

assume the presence of a military organization. Is this not the way an army

deterritorializes its soldiers? An army is composed of units, companies,

and divisions. The Numbers may vary in function, in combination; they

may enter into entirely different strategies; but there is always a connection

between the Number and the war machine. It is a question not of quantity

but of organization or composition. When the State creates armies, it

always applies this principle of numerical organization; but all it does is

adopt the principle, at the same time as it appropriates the war machine.

For so peculiar an idea—the numerical organization of people—came

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from the nomads. It was the Hyksos, conquering nomads, who brought it to

Egypt; and when Moses applied it to his people in exodus, it was on the

advice of his nomad father-in-law, Jethro the Kenite, and was done in such

a way as to constitute a war machine, the elements of which are described in

the biblical book of Numbers. The nomos is fundamentally numerical,

arithmetic. When Greek geometrism is contrasted with Indo-Arab

arithmetism, it becomes clear that the latter implies a nomos opposable to

the logos: not that the nomads "do" arithmetic or algebra, but because

arithmetic and algebra arise in a strongly nomad influenced world.

Up to now we have known three major types of human organization: lin-

eal, territorial, and numerical. Lineal organization allows us to define

so-called primitive societies. Clan lineages are essentially segments in

action; they meld and divide, and vary according to the ancestor consid-

ered, the tasks, and the circumstances. Of course, number plays an impor-

tant role in the determination of lineage, or in the creation of new

lineages—as does the earth, since a clan segmentarity is doubled by a tribal

segmentarity. The earth is before all else the matter upon which the

dynamic of lineages is inscribed, and the number, a means of inscription:

the lineages write upon the earth and with the number, constituting a kind

of "geodesy." Everything changes with State societies: it is often said that

the territorial principle becomes dominant. One could also speak of

deterritorialization, since the earth becomes an object, instead of being an

active material element in combination with lineage. Property is precisely

the deterritorialized relation between the human being and the earth; this

is so whether property constitutes a good belonging to the State,

superposed upon continuing possession by a lineal community, or whether

it itself becomes a good belonging to private individuals constituting a new

community. In both cases (and according to the two poles of the State),

something like an overcoding of the earth replaces geodesy. Of course, line-

ages remain very important, and numbers take on their own importance.

But what moves to the forefront is a "territorial" organization, in the sense

that all the segments, whether of lineage, land, or number, are taken up by
an astronomical space or a geometrical extension that overcodes them—

but certainly not in the same way in the archaic imperial State and in mod-

ern States. The archaic State envelops a spatium with a summit, a

differentiated space with depth and levels, whereas modern States (begin-

ning with the Greek city-state) develop a homogeneous extensio with an

immanent center, divisible homologous parts, and symmetrical and

reversible relations. Not only do the two models, the astronomical and the

geometrical, enter into intimate mixes, but even when they are supposedly

pure, both imply the subordination of lineages and numbers to this metric

power, as it appears either in the imperial spatium or in the political

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extension Arithmetic, the number, has always had a decisive role in the

State apparatus: this is so even as early as the imperial bureaucracy, with

the three conjoined operations of the census, taxation, and election. It is

even truer of modern forms of the State, which in developing utilized all

the calculation techniques that were springing up at the border between

mathematical science and social technology (there is a whole social calcu-

lus at the basis of political economy, demography, the organization of

work, etc.). This arithmetic element of the State found its specific power in

the treatment of all kinds of matter: primary matters (raw materials), the

secondary matter of wrought objects, or the ultimate matter constituted by

the human population. Thus the number has always served to gain mastery

over matter, to control its variations and movements, in other words, to

submit them to the spatiotemporal framework of the State—either the

imperial spatium, or the modern extensio.

The State has a territorial

principle, or a principle of deterritorialization, that links the number to

metric magnitudes (taking into account the increasingly complex metrics

effecting the overcoding). We do not believe that the conditions of inde-

pendence or autonomy of the Number are to be found in the State, even

though all the factors of its development are present.

The Numbering Number, in other words, autonomous arithmetic organ-

ization, implies neither a superior degree of abstraction nor very large

quantities. It relates only to conditions of possibility constituted by

nomadism and to conditions of effectuation constituted by the war

machine. It is in State armies that the problem of the treatment of large

quantities arises, in relation to other matters; but the war machine operates

with small quantities that it treats using numbering numbers. These num-

bers appear as soon as one distributes something in space, instead of divid-

ing up space or distributing space itself. The number becomes a subject.

The independence of the number in relation to space is a result not of

abstraction but of the concrete nature of smooth space, which is occupied

without itself being counted. The number is no longer a means of counting

or measuring but of moving: it is the number itself that moves through

smooth space. There is undoubtedly a geometry of smooth space: but as we

have seen, it is a minor, operative geometry, a geometry of the trait. The

more independent space is from a metrics, the more independent the num-

ber is from space. Geometry as a royal science has little importance for the

war machine (its only importance is in State armies, and for sedentary for-

tification, but it leads generals to serious defeats).

The number becomes a

principle whenever it occupies a smooth space, and is deployed within it as

subject, instead of measuring a striated space. The number is the mobile

occupant, the movable (meuble) in smooth space, as opposed to the

geometry of the immovable (immeuble) in striated space. The nomadic

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numerical unit is the ambulant fire, and not the tent, which is still too much

of an immovable: "The fire takes precedence over the yurt." The number-

ing number is no longer subordinated to metric determinations or geomet-

rical dimensions, but has only a dynamic relation with geographical

directions: it is a directional number, not a dimensional or metric one.

Nomad organization is indissolubly arithmetic and directional; quantity is

everywhere, tens, hundreds, direction is everywhere, left, right: the numer-

ical chief is also the chief of the left or the right.

The numbering number is

rhythmic, not harmonic. It is not related to cadence or measure: it is only in

State armies, and for reasons of discipline and show, that one marches in

cadence; but autonomous numerical organization finds its meaning else-

where, whenever it is necessary to establish an order of displacement on the

steppe, the desert—at the point where the lineages of the forest dwellers

and the figures of the State lose their relevance. "He moved with the ran-

dom walk which made only those sounds natural to the desert. Nothing in

his passage would [indicate] that human flesh moved there. It was a way of

walking so deeply conditioned in him that he didn't need to think about it.

The feet moved of themselves, no measurable rhythm to their pacing."

the war machine and nomadic existence, the number is no longer num-

bered, but becomes a Cipher (Chiffre), and it is in this capacity that it con-

stitutes the "esprit de corps" and invents the secret and its outgrowths

(strategy, espionage, war ruses, ambush, diplomacy, etc.).

A ciphered, rhythmic, directional, autonomous, movable, numbering

number: the war machine is like the necessary consequence of nomadic

organization (Moses experienced it, with all its consequences). Some peo-

ple nowadays are too eager to criticize this numerical organization,

denouncing it as a military or even concentration-camp society where peo-

ple are no longer anything more than deterritorialized "numbers." But that

is false. Horror for horror, the numerical organization of people is certainly

no cruder than the lineal or State organizations. Treating people like num-

bers is not necessarily worse than treating them like trees to prune, or geo-

metrical figures to shape and model. Moreover, the use of the number as a

numeral, as a statistical element, is proper to the numbered number of the

State, not to the numbering number. And the world of the concentration

camp operates as much by lineages and territories as by numeration. The

question is not one of good or bad but of specificity. The specificity of

numerical organization rests on the nomadic mode of existence and the

war machine function. The numbering number is distinct both from lineal

codes and State overcoding. Arithmetic composition, on the one hand,

selects, extracts from the lineages the elements that will enter into

nomadism and the war machine and, on the other hand, directs them

against the State apparatus, opposing a machine and an existence to the

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TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 391

State apparatus, drawing a deterritorialization that cuts across both the lin-

eal territorialities and the territory or deterritoriality of the State.

A first characteristic of the numbering, nomadic or war, number is that

it is always complex, that is, articulated. A complex of numbers every time.

It is exactly for this reason that it in no way implies large, homogenized

quantities, like State numbers or the numbered number, but rather pro-

duces its effect of immensity by its fine articulation, in other words, by its

distribution of heterogeneity in a free space. Even State armies do not do

away with this principle when they deal with large numbers (despite the

predominance of "base" 10). The Roman legion was a number made up of

numbers, articulated in such a way that the segments became mobile, and

the figures geometrical, changing, transformational. The complex or artic-

ulated number comprises not only men but necessarily weapons, animals,

and vehicles. The arithmetic base unit is therefore a unit of assemblage, for

example, man-horse-bow, lxl X 1, according to the formula that carried the

Scythians to triumph; and the formula becomes more complicated to the

extent that certain "weapons" assemble or articulate several men or

animals, as in the case of the chariot with two horses and two men, one to

drive and the other to throw, 2 X 1 X 2 = 1; or in the case of the famous

two-handled shield of the hoplite reform, which soldered together human

chains. However small the unit, it is articulated. The numbering number

always has several bases at the same time. It is also necessary to take into

account arithmetic relations that are external yet still contained in the

number, expressing the proportion of combatants among the members of a

lineage or tribe, the role of reserves and stocks, the upkeep of people,

things, and animals. Logistics is the art of these external relations, which

are no less a part of the war machine than the internal relations of strategy,

in other words, the composition of combat units in relation to one another.

The two together constitute the science of the articulation of numbers of

war. Every assemblage has this strategic aspect and this logistical aspect.

But the numbering number has a second, more secret, characteristic.

Everywhere, the war machine displays a curious process of arithmetic rep-

lication or doubling, as if it operated along two nonsymmetrical and

nonequal series. On the one hand, the lineages are indeed organized and

reshuffled numerically; a numerical composition is superimposed upon

the lineages in order to bring the new principle into predominance. But on
the other hand, men are simultaneously extracted from each lineage to

form a special numerical body—as if the new numerical composition of

the lineage-body could not succeed without the constitution of a body

proper to it, itself numerical. We believe that this is not an accidental

phenomenon but rather an essential constituent of the war machine, a

necessary operation for the autonomy of the number: the number of the

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body must have as its correlate a body of the number; the number must be

doubled according to two complementary operations. For the social body

to be numerized, the number must form a special body. When Genghis

Khan undertook his great composition of the steppe, he numerically or-

ganized the lineages, and the fighters in each lineage, placing them under a

cipher and a chief (groups of ten with decurions, groups of one hundred

with centurions, groups of one thousand with chiliarchs). He also extracted

from each arithmetized lineage a small number of men who were to consti-

tute his personal guard, in other words, a dynamic formation comprising a

staff, commissars, messengers, and diplomats ("antrustions").

One is

never without the other: a double deterritorialization, the second of which

is to a higher power. When Moses undertook his great composition of the

desert—where the influence he felt from the nomads was necessarily

stronger than that of Yahweh—he took a census of each tribe and or-

ganized them numerically; he also decreed a law according to which the

firstborn of each tribe at that particular time belonged by right to Yahweh.

As these firstborn were obviously still too young, their role in the Number

was transferred to a special tribe, the Levites, who provided the body of the

Number or the special guard of the ark; and as the Levites were less numer-

ous than the new firstborn of the tribes taken together, the excess firstborn

had to be bought back by the tribes in the form of taxes (bringing us back to

a fundamental aspect of logistics). The war machine would be unable to

function without this double series: it is necessary both that numerical

composition replace lineal organization and that it conjure away the ter-

ritorial organization of the State. Power in the war machine is defined ac-

cording to this double series: power is no longer based on segments and

centers, on the potential resonance of centers and overcoding of segments,

but on these relations internal to the Number and independent of quantity.

Tensions or power struggles are also a result of this: between Moses' tribes

and the Levites, between Genghis's "noyans" and "antrustions." This is

not simply a protest on the part of lineages wishing to regain their former

autonomy; nor is it the prefiguration of a struggle for control over a State

apparatus. It is a tension inherent in the war machine, in its special power,

and in the particular limitations placed on the power of the "chief."

Thus numerical composition, or the numbering number, implies several

operations: the arithmetization of the starting aggregates or sets (the line-

ages); the union of the extracted subsets (the constitution of groups often,

one hundred, etc.); and the formation by substitution of another set in cor-

respondence with the united set (the special body). It is this last operation

that implies the most variety and originality in nomad existence. The same

problem arises even in State armies, when the war machine is appropriated

by the State. In effect, if the arithmetization of the social body has as its cor-

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TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE d 393

relate the formation of a distinct special body, itself arithmetic, this special

body may be constructed in several ways: (1) from a privileged lineage or

tribe, the dominance of which subsequently takes on a new meaning (the

case of Moses, with the Levites); (2) from representatives of each lineage,

who subsequently serve also as hostages (the firstborn; this would actually

be the Asian case, or the case of Genghis); (3) from a totally different ele-

ment, one exterior to the base society, slaves, foreigners, or people of

another religion (this was already the case as early as the Saxon regime, in

which the king used Frankish slaves to compose his special body; but Islam

is the prime example, even inspiring a specific sociological category, that of

"military slavery": the Mameluks of Egypt, slaves from the steppe or the

Caucasus who were purchased at a very early age by the sultan; or the Otto-

man Janissaries, who came from Christian communities).

Is this not the origin of an important theme, "the nomads as child

stealers"? It is clear, especially in the last example, how the special body is

instituted as an element determinant of power in the war machine. The war

machine and nomadic existence have to ward off two things simultane-

ously: a return of the lineal aristocracy and the formation of imperial

functionaries. What complicates everything is that the State itself has often

been determined in such a way as to use slaves as high functionaries. As we

shall see, the reasons for this varied, and although the two currents con-

verged in armies, they came from two distinct sources. For the power of

slaves, foreigners, or captives in a war machine of nomadic origin is very

different from the power of lineal aristocracies, as well as from that of State

functionaries and bureaucrats. They are "commissars," emissaries, diplo-

mats, spies, strategists, and logisticians, sometimes smiths. They cannot be

explained away as a "whim of the sultan." On the contrary, it is the possibil-

ity of the war chief having whims that is explained by the objective exis-

tence and necessity of this special numerical body, this Cipher that has

value only in relation to a nomos. There is both a deterritorialization and a

becoming proper to the war machine; the special body, in particular the

slave-infidel-foreigner, is the one who becomes a soldier and believer while

remaining deterritorialized in relation to the lineages and the State. You

have to be born an infidel to become a believer; you have to be born a slave

to become a soldier. Specific schools or institutions are needed for this pur-

pose: the special body is an invention proper to the war machine, which

States always utilize, adapting it so totally to their own ends that it becomes

unrecognizable, or restituting it in bureaucratic staff form, or in the tech-

nocratic form of very special bodies, or in "esprit de corps" that serve the

State as much as they resist it, or among the commissars who double the

State as much as they serve it.

It is true that the nomads have no history; they only have a geography.

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And the defeat of the nomads was such, so complete, that history is one

with the triumph of States. We have witnessed, as a result, a generalized cri-

tique dismissing the nomads as incapable of any innovation, whether tech-

nological or metallurgical, political or metaphysical. Historians, bourgeois

or Soviet (Grousset or Vladimirtsov), consider the nomads a pitiable seg-

ment of humanity that understands nothing: not technology, to which it

supposedly remained indifferent; not agriculture, not the cities and States

it destroyed or conquered. It is difficult to see, however, how the nomads

could have triumphed in war if they did not possess strong metallurgical

capabilities (the idea that the nomads received their technical weapons and

political counseling from renegades from an imperial State is highly im-

probable). It is difficult to see how the nomads could have undertaken to

destroy cities and States, except in the name of a nomad organization and a

war machine defined not by ignorance but by their positive characteristics,

by their specific space, by a composition all their own that broke with line-

ages and warded off the State-form. History has always dismissed the

nomads. Attempts have been made to apply a properly military category to

the war machine (that of "military democracy") and a properly sedentary

category to nomadism (that of "feudalism"). But these two hypotheses pre-

suppose a territorial principle: either that an imperial State appropriates

the war machine, distributing land to warriors as a benefit of their position
(cleroi and false fiefs), or that property, once it has become private, in itself

posits relations of dependence among the property owners constituting the

army (true fiefs and vassalage).

In both cases, the number is subordinated

to an "immobile" fiscal organization, in order to establish which land can

be or has been ceded, as well as to set the taxes owed by the beneficiaries

themselves. There is no doubt that nomad organization and the war

machine deal with these same problems, both the level of land and of taxa-

tion (in which the nomadic warriors were great innovators, despite what is

said to the contrary). But they invent a territoriality and a "movable" fiscal

organization that testify to the autonomy of a numerical principle: there

can be a confusion or combination of the systems, but the specificity of the

nomadic system remains the subordination of land to numbers that are

displaced and deployed, and of taxation to relations internal to those num-

bers (already with Moses, for example, taxation played a role in the relation

between the numerical bodies and the special body of the number). In

short, military democracy and feudalism, far from explaining the numeri-

cal composition of the nomads, instead testify to what may survive of them

in sedentary regimes.

ROPOSITION

VII. Nomad existence has for "affects" the weapons of a war

machine.

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A distinction can always be made between weapons and tools on the

basis of their usage (destroying people or producing goods). But although

this extrinsic distinction explains certain secondary adaptations of a tech-

nical object, it does not preclude a general convertibility between the two

groups, to the extent that it seems very difficult to propose an intrinsic dif-

ference between weapons and tools. The types of percussion, as defined by

Andre Leroi-Gourhan, are found on both sides. "For ages on end agricul-

tural implements and weapons of war must have remained identical."

Some have spoken of an "ecosystem," not only situated at the origin, in

which work tools and weapons of war exchange their determinations: it

seems that the same machinicphylum traverses both. And yet we have the

feeling that there are many internal differences, even if they are not intrin-

sic, in other words, logical or conceptual, and even if they remain approxi-

mate. As a first approximation, weapons have a privileged relation with

projection. Anything that throws or is thrown is fundamentally a weapon,

and propulsion is its essential moment. The weapon is ballistic; the very

notion of the "problem" is related to the war machine. The more mecha-

nisms of projection a tool has, the more it behaves like a weapon, poten-

tially or simply metaphorically. In addition, tools are constantly compen-

sating for the projective mechanisms they possess, or else they adapt them

to other ends. It is true that missile weapons, in the strict sense, whether

projected or projecting, are only one kind among others; but even hand-

held weapons require a usage of the hand and arm different from that

required by tools, a projective usage exemplified in the martial arts. The

tool, on the other hand, is much more introceptive, introjective: it prepares

a matter from a distance, in order to bring it to a state of equilibrium or to

appropriate it for a form of interiority. Action at a distance exists in both

cases, but in one case it is centrifugal and in the other, centripetal. One

could also say that the tool encounters resistances, to be conquered or put

to use, while the weapon has to do with counterattack, to be avoided or

invented (the counterattack is in fact the precipitating and inventive factor

in the war machine, to the extent that it is not simply reducible to a quanti-

tative rivalry or defensive parade).

Second, weapons and tools do not "tendentially" (approximately) have

the same relation to movement, to speed. It is yet another essential contri-

bution of Paul Virilio to have stressed this weapon-speed complemen-

tarity: the weapon invents speed, or the discovery of speed invents the

weapon (the projective character of weapons is the result). The war

machine releases a vector of speed so specific to it that it needs a special

name; it is not only the power of destruction, but "dromocracy" (= nomos).

Among other advantages, this idea articulates a new mode of distinction

between the hunt and war. For it is certain not only that war does not derive

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from the hunt but also that the hunt does not promote weapons: either war

evolved in the sphere of indistinction and convertibility between weapons

and tools, or it used to its own advantage weapons already distinguished,

already constituted. As Virilio says, war in no way appears when man

applies to man the relation of the hunter to the animal, but on the contrary

when he captures the force of the hunted animal and enters an entirely new

relation to man, that of war (enemy, no longer prey). It is therefore not sur-

prising that the war machine was the invention of the animal-raising

nomads: animal breeding and training are not to be confused either with

the primitive hunt or with sedentary domestication, but are in fact the dis-

covery of a projecting and projectile system. Rather than operating by

blow-by-blow violence, or constituting a violence "once and for all," the

war machine, with breeding and training, institutes an entire economy of

violence, in other words, a way of making violence durable, even unlim-

ited. "Bloodletting, immediate killing, run contrary to the unlimited usage

of violence, that is, to its economy.... The economy of violence is not that of
the hunter in the animal raiser, but that of the hunted animal. In horseback

riding, one conserves the kinetic energy, the speed of the horse, and no

longer its proteins (the motor, and no longer the flesh).. . . Whereas in the

hunt the hunter's aim was to arrest the movement of wild animality

through systematic slaughter, the animal breeder [sets about] conserving it,

and, by means of training, the rider joins with this movement, orienting it

and provoking its acceleration." The technological motor would develop

this tendency further, but "horseback riding was the first projector of the

warrior, his first system of arms."

Whence becoming-animal in the war

machine. Does this mean that the war machine did not exist before horse-

back riding and the cavalry? That is not the issue. The issue is that the war

machine implies the release of a Speed vector that becomes a free or inde-

pendent variable; this does not occur in the hunt, where speed is associated

primarily with the hunted animal. It is possible for this race vector to be

released in an infantry, without recourse to horseback riding; it is possible,

moreover, for there to be horseback riding, but as a means of transporta-

tion or even of portage having nothing to do with the free vector. In any

event, what the warrior borrows from the animal is more the idea of the

motor than the model of the prey. He does not generalize the idea of the

prey by applying it to the enemy; he abstracts the idea of the motor, apply-

ing it to himself.

Two objections immediately arise. According to the first, the war

machine possesses as much weight and gravity as it does speed (the distinc-

tion between the heavy and the light, the dissymmetry between defense and

attack, the opposition between rest and tension). But it would be easy to

demonstrate that phenomena of "temporization," and even of immobility

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and catatonia, so important in wars, relate in certain cases to a component

of pure speed. And the rest of the time, they relate to the conditions under

which State apparatuses appropriate the war machine, notably by arrang-

ing a striated space where opposing forces can come to an equilibrium. It

can happen that speed is abstracted as the property of a projectile, a bullet

or artillery shell, which condemns the weapon itself, and the soldier, to

immobility (for example, immobility in the First World War). But an equi-

librium of forces is a phenomenon of resistance, whereas the counterattack

implies a rush or change of speed that breaks the equilibrium: it was the

tank that regrouped all of the operations in the speed vector and recreated a

smooth space for movement by uprooting men and arms.

The opposite objection is more complex: it is that speed does indeed

seem to be as much a part of the tool as of the weapon, and is no way specific

to the war machine. The history of the motor is not only military. But per-

haps there is too much of a tendency to think in terms of quantities of

movement, instead of seeking qualitative models. The two ideal models of

the motor are those of work and free action. Work is a motor cause that

meets resistances, operates upon the exterior, is consumed and spent in its

effect, and must be renewed from one moment to the next. Free action is

also a motor cause, but one that has no resistance to overcome, operates

only upon the mobile body itself, is not consumed in its effect, and contin-

ues from one moment to the next. Whatever its measure or degree, speed is

relative in the first case, absolute in the second (the idea of a perpetuum
mobile). In work, what counts is the point of application of a resultant force

exerted by the weight of a body considered as "one" (gravity), and the rela-

tive displacement of this point of application. In free action, what counts is

the way in which the elements of the body escape gravitation to occupy

absolutely a nonpunctuated space. Weapons and weapon handling seem to

be linked to a free-action model, and tools to a work model. Linear dis-

placement, from one point to another, constitutes the relative movement

of the tool, but it is the vortical occupation of a space that constitutes the

absolute movement of the weapon. It is as though the weapon were moving,

self-propelling, while the tool is moved. This link between tools and work

remains obscured unless work receives the motor, or real, definition we

have just given it. The tool does not define work; just the opposite. The tool

presupposes work. It must be added that weapons, also, obviously imply a

renewal of the cause, an expending or even disappearance in the effect, the

encountering of external resistances, a displacement of force, etc. It would

be futile to credit weapons with a magical power in contrast to the con-

straints of tools: weapons and tools are subject to the same laws, which

define, precisely, their common sphere. But the principle behind all tech-

nology is to demonstrate that a technical element remains abstract,

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entirely undetermined, as long as one does not relate it to an assemblage it

presupposes. It is the machine that is primary in relation to the technical

element: not the technical machine, itself a collection of elements, but the

social or collective machine, the machinic assemblage that determines

what is a technical element at a given moment, what is its usage, extension,

comprehension, etc.

It is through the intermediary of assemblages that the phylum selects,

qualifies, and even invents the technical elements. Thus one cannot speak

of weapons or tools before defining the constituent assemblages they pre-

suppose and enter into. This is what we meant when we said that weapons

and tools are not merely distinguished from one another in an extrinsic

manner, and yet they have no distinctive intrinsic characteristics. They

have internal (and not intrinsic) characteristics relating to the respective

assemblages with which they are associated. What effectuates a free-action

model is not the weapons in themselves and in their physical aspect but the

"war machine" assemblage as formal cause of the weapons. And what

effectuates the work model is not the tools but the "work machine" assem-

blage as formal cause of the tools. When we say that the weapon is insepara-

ble from a speed vector, while the tool remains tied to conditions of gravity,

we are claiming only to signal a difference between two types of assem-

blage, a distinction that holds even if in the assemblage proper to it the tool

is abstractly "faster," and the weapon abstractly "weightier." The tool is

essentially tied to a genesis, a displacement, and an expenditure of force

whose laws reside in work, while the weapon concerns only the exercise or

manifestation of force in space and time, in conformity with free action.

The weapon does not fall from the sky, and obviously assumes production,

displacement, expenditure, and resistance. But this aspect relates to the

common sphere of the weapon and the tool, and does not yet concern the

specificity of the weapon, which appears only when force is considered in

itself, when it is no longer tied to anything but the number, movement,

space, or time, or when speed is added to displacement.

Concretely, a

weapon as such relates not to the Work model but to the Free-Action

model, with the assumption that the conditions of work are fulfilled else-

where. In short, from the point of view of force, the tool is tied to a

gravity-displacement, weight-height system, and the weapon to a
speed-perpetuum mobile system (it is in this sense that it can be said that

speed in itself is a "weapons system").

The very general primacy of the collective and machinic assemblage

over the technical element applies generally, for tools as for weapons.

Weapons and tools are consequences, nothing but consequences. It has

often been remarked that a weapon is nothing outside of the combat organ-

ization it is bound up with. For example, "hoplite" weapons existed only by

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virtue of the phalanx as a mutation of the war machine: the only new

weapon at the time, the two-handled shield, was created by this assem-

blage; the other weapons were preexistent, but in other combinations

where they had a different function, a different nature.

It is always the

assemblage that constitutes the weapons system. The lance and the sword

came into being in the Bronze Age only by virtue of the man-horse assem-

blage, which caused a lengthening of the dagger and pike, and made the

first infantry weapons, the morning star and the battle-ax, obsolete. The

stirrup, in turn, occasioned a new figure of the man-horse assemblage,

entailing a new type of lance and new weapons; and this man-horse-stirrup

constellation is itself variable, and has different effects depending on

whether it is bound up with the general conditions of nomadism, or later

readapted to the sedentary conditions of feudalism. The situation is

exactly the same for the tool: once again, everything depends on an organi-

zation of work, and variable assemblages of human, animal, and thing.

Thus the heavy plow exists as a specific tool only in a constellation where

"long open fields" predominate, where the horse tends to replace the ox as

draft animal, where the land begins to undergo triennial rotation, and

where the economy becomes communal. Beforehand, the heavy plow may

well have existed, but on the margins of other assemblages that did not

bring out its specificity, that left unexploited its differential character with

the scratch plow.

Assemblages are passional, they are compositions of desire. Desire has

nothing to do with a natural or spontaneous determination; there is no

desire but assembling, assembled, desire. The rationality, the efficiency, of

an assemblage does not exist without the passions the assemblage brings into

play, without the desires that constitute it as much as it constitutes them.

Detienne has shown that the Greek phalanx was inseparable from a whole

reversal of values, and from a passional mutation that drastically changed

the relations between desire and the war machine. It is a case of man

dismounting from the horse, and of the man-animal relation being

replaced by a relation between men in an infantry assemblage that paves

the way for the advent of the peasant-soldier, the citizen-soldier: the entire

Eros of war changes, a group homosexual Eros tends to replace the

zoosexual Eros of the horseman. Undoubtedly, whenever a State appropri-

ates the war machine, it tends to assimilate the education of the citizen to

the training of the worker to the apprenticeship of the soldier. But if it is

true that all assemblages are assemblages of desire, the question is whether

the assemblages of war and work, considered in themselves, do not funda-

mentally mobilize passions of different orders. Passions are effectuations

of desire that differ according to the assemblage: it is not the same justice or

the same cruelty, the same pity, etc. The work regime is inseparable from an

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organization and a development of Form, corresponding to which is the

formation of the subject. This is the passional regime of feeling as "the

form of the worker." Feeling implies an evaluation of matter and its resis-

tances, a direction (sens, also "meaning") to form and its developments, an

economy of force and its displacements, an entire gravity. But the regime of

the war machine is on the contrary that of affects, which relate only to the

moving body in itself, to speeds and compositions of speed among ele-

ments. Affect is the active discharge of emotion, the counterattack,

whereas feeling is an always displaced, retarded, resisting emotion. Affects

are projectiles just like weapons; feelings are introceptive like tools. There

is a relation between the affect and the weapon, as witnessed not only in

mythology but also in the chanson degeste, and the chivalric novel or novel

of courtly love. Weapons are affects and affects weapons. From this stand-

point, the most absolute immobility, pure catatonia, is a part of the speed

vector, is carried by this vector, which links the petrification of the act to

the precipitation of movement. The knight sleeps on his mount, then

departs like an arrow. Kleist is the author who best integrated these sudden

catatonic fits, swoons, suspenses, with the utmost speeds of a war machine.

He presents us with a becoming-weapon of the technical element simulta-

neous to a becoming-affect of the passional element (the Penthesilea equa-

tion). The martial arts have always subordinated weapons to speed, and

above all to mental (absolute) speed; for this reason, they are also the arts of

suspense and immobility. The affect passes through both extremes. Thus

the martial arts do not adhere to a code, as an affair of the State, but follow
ways, which are so many paths of the affect; upon these ways, one learns to

"unuse" weapons as much as one learns to use them, as if the power and cul-

tivation of the affect were the true goal of the assemblage, the weapon being

only a provisory means. Learning to undo things, and to undo oneself, is

proper to the war machine: the "not-doing" of the warrior, the undoing of

the subject. A movement of decoding runs through the war machine, while

overcoding solders the tool to an organization of work and of the State (the

tool is never unlearned; one can only compensate for its absence). It is true

that the martial arts continually invoke the center of gravity and the rules

for its displacement. That is because these ways are not the ultimate ones.

However far they go, they are still in the domain of Being, and only trans-

late absolute movements of another nature into the common space—those

effectuated in the Void, not in nothingness, but in the smooth of the void

where there is no longer any goal: attacks, counterattacks, and headlong

plunges.

Still from the standpoint of the assemblage, there is an essential relation

between tools and signs. That is because the work model that defines the

tool belongs to the State apparatus. It has often been said that people in

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primitive societies do not, strictly speaking, work, even if their activities

are very constrained and regulated; and the man of war, in his capacity as a

man of war, does not work either (the "labors" of Hercules assume submis-

sion to a king). The technical element becomes a tool when it is abstracted

from the territory and is applied to the earth as an object; but at the same

time, the sign ceases to be inscribed upon the body and is written upon an

immobile, objective matter. For there to be work, there must be a capture

of activity by the State apparatus, and a semiotization of activity by writ-

ing. Hence the affinity between the assemblages signs-tools, and signs of

writing-organization of work. Entirely different is the case of the weapon,

which is in an essential relation with jewelry. Jewelry has undergone so

many secondary adaptations that we no longer have a clear understanding

of what it is. But something lights up in our mind when we are told that

metalworking was the "barbarian," or nomad, art par excellence, and when

we see these masterpieces of minor art. These fibulas, these gold or silver

plaques, these pieces of jewelry, are attached to small movable objects; they

are not only easy to transport, but pertain to the object only as object in

motion. These plaques constitute traits of expression of pure speed, car-

ried on objects that are themselves mobile and moving. The relation

between them is not that of form-matter but of motif-support, where the

earth is no longer anything more than ground (sol), where there is no longer

even any ground at all because the support is as mobile as the motif. They

lend colors the speed of light, turning gold to red and silver to white light.

They are attached to the horse's harness, the sheath of the sword, the

warrior's garments, the handle of the weapon; they even decorate things

used only once, such as arrowheads. Regardless of the effort or toil they

imply, they are of the order of free action, related to pure mobility, and not

of the order of work with its conditions of gravity, resistance, and expendi-

ture. The ambulant smith links metalworking to the weapon, and vice

versa. Gold and silver have taken on many other functions but cannot be

understood apart from this nomadic contribution made by the war

machine, in which they are not matters but traits of expression appropriate

to weapons (the whole mythology of war not only subsists in money but is

the active factor in it). Jewels are the affects corresponding to weapons, that

are swept up by the same speed vector.

Metalworking, jewelry making, ornamentation, even decoration, do not

form a writing, even though they have a power of abstraction that is in

every way equal to that of writing. But this power is assembled differently.

In the case of writing, the nomads had no need to create their own system;

they borrowed that of their sedentary imperial neighbors, who even fur-

nished them with a phonetic transcription of their languages.

"The

goldsmith's and silversmith's is the barbarian art par excellence; filigree

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and gold and silver plating. . . . Scythian art, tied as it was to a nomadic and

warlike economy that both used and repudiated a commerce reserved for

foreigners, now moved toward this luxurious and decorative type of work.

The barbarians. .. did not need to possess or create a precise code, such as

for instance an elementary picto-ideographic one—still less a syllabic writ-

ing of their own, which would indeed have had to compete with the ones in

use among their more advanced neighbors. Toward the fourth and third

centuries B.C. the Scythian art of the Black Sea region thus tends naturally

toward a graphic schematization of its forms, which makes them more of a

linear ornamentation than a proto-writing."

Of course, one may write on

jewelry, metal plaques, or even weapons, but only in the sense that one

applies a preexisting writing system to these matters. The case of runic writ-
ing is more troubling because its origins seem exclusively tied to jewelry,

fibulas, elements of metalworking, small movable objects. The point is

that in its early period runic writing had only a weak communication value

and a very restricted public function. Its secret character has led many to

interpret it as magical writing. Rather, it is an affective semiotic, compris-

ing in particular: (1) signatures, as marks of possession or fabrication, and

(2) short war or love messages. It constitutes a text that is "ornamental"

rather than scriptural, "an invention with little utility, half-aborted," a sub-

stitute writing. It only takes on the value of writing during a second period,

when monumental inscriptions appear, with the Danish reform of the

ninth century A.D., in connection with the State and work.

It may be objected that tools, weapons, signs, and jewelry in fact occur

everywhere, in a common sphere. But that is not the problem, any more

than it is to seek an origin in each case. It is a question of assigning assem-

blages, in other words, of determining the differential traits according to

which an element formally belongs to one assemblage rather than to

another. It could also be said that architecture and cooking have an appar-

ent affinity with the State, whereas music and drugs have differential traits

that place them on the side of the nomadic war machine.

It is therefore a

differential method that establishes the distinction between weapons and
tools, from at least five points of view: the direction (sens)

(projection-introception), the vector (speed-gravity), the model (free

action-work), the expression (jewelry-signs), and the passional or desiring

tonality (affect-feeling). Doubtless the State apparatus tends to bring

uniformity to the regimes, by disciplining its armies, by making work a

fundamental unit, in other words, by imposing its own traits. But it is not

impossible for weapons and tools, if they are taken up by new assemblages

of metamorphosis, to enter other relations of alliance. The man of war may

at times form peasant or worker alliances, but it is more frequent for a

worker, industrial or agricultural, to reinvent a war machine. Peasants

made an important con-

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tribution to the history of artillery during the Hussite wars, when Zizka

armed mobile fortresses made from oxcarts with portable cannons. A

worker-soldier, weapon-tool, sentiment-affect affinity marks the right

time, however fleeting, for revolutions and popular wars. There is a schizo-

phrenic taste for the tool that moves it away from work and toward free

action, a schizophrenic taste for the weapon that turns it into a means for

peace, for obtaining peace. A counterattack and a resistance simultane-

ously. Everything is ambiguous. But we do not believe that Ernst Junger's

analyses are disqualified by this ambiguity when he portrays the "Rebel" as

a transhistorical figure drawing the Worker, on the one hand, and the Sol-

dier, on the other, down a shared line of flight where one says simultane-

ously "I seek a weapon" and "I am looking for a tool": Draw the line, or

what amounts to the same thing, cross the line, pass over the line, for the

line is only drawn by surpassing the line of separation.

Undoubtedly,

nothing is more outmoded than the man of war: he has long since been

transformed into an entirely different character, the military man. And the

worker himself has undergone so many misadventures . . . And yet men of

war reappear, with many ambiguities: they are all those who know the

use-lessness of violence but who are adjacent to a war machine to be

recreated, one of active, revolutionary counterattacks. Workers also

reappear who do not believe in work but who are adjacent to a work

machine to be recreated, one of active resistance and technological

liberation. They do not resuscitate old myths or archaic figures; they are

the new figures of a transhistorical assemblage (neither historical nor

eternal, but untimely): the nomad warrior and the ambulant worker. A

somber caricature already precedes them, the mercenary or mobile

military adviser, and the technocrat or transhumant analyst, CIA and

IBM. But transhistorical figures must defend themselves as much against

old myths as against preestablished, anticipatory disfigurations. "One

does not go back to reconquer the myth, one encounters it anew, when

time quakes at its foundations under the empire of extreme danger."

Martial arts and state-of-the-art technologies have value only because

they create the possibility of bringing together worker and warrior masses

of a new type. The shared line of flight of the weapon and the tool: a pure

possibility, a mutation. There arise subterranean, aerial, submarine

technicians who belong more or less to the world order, but who

involuntarily invent and amass virtual charges of knowledge and action

that are usable by others, minute but easily acquired for new assemblages.

The borrowings between warfare and the military apparatus, work and free

action, always run in both directions, for a struggle that is all the more

varied.

ROBLEM

HI. How do the nomads invent or find their weapons?

404 □ 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

ROPOSITION

VIII. Metallurgy in itself constitutes a flow necessarily confluent

with nomadism.

The political, economic, and social regime of the peoples of the steppe

are less well known than their innovations in war, in the areas of offensive

and defensive weapons, composition or strategy, and technological ele-

ments (the saddle, stirrup, horseshoe, harness, etc.). History contests each

innovation but cannot succeed in effacing the nomad traces. What the

nomads invented was the man-animal-weapon, man-horse-bow assem-

blage. Through this assemblage of speed, the ages of metal are marked by

innovation. The socketed bronze battle-ax of the Hyksos and the iron

sword of the Hittites have been compared to miniature atomic bombs. It

has been possible to establish a rather precise periodization of the weapons

of the steppe, showing the alternation between heavy and light armament

(the Scythian type and the Sarmatian type), and their mixed forms. The

cast steel saber, often short and curved, a weapon for side attack with the

edge of the blade, envelops a different dynamic space than the forged iron

sword used for frontal attack with the point: it was the Scythians who

brought it to India and Persia, where the Arabs would later acquire it. It is

commonly agreed that the nomads lost their role as innovators with the

advent of firearms, in particular the cannon ("gunpowder overtook

them"). But it was not necessarily because they did not know how to use

them. Not only did armies like the Turkish army, whose nomadic tradi-

tions remained strong, develop extensive firepower, a new space, but addi-

tionally, and even more characteristically, light artillery was thoroughly

integrated into mobile formations of wagons, pirate ships, etc. If the can-

non marks a limit for the nomads, it is on the contrary because it implies an

economic investment that only a State apparatus can make (even commer-

cial cities do not suffice). The fact remains that for weapons other than fire-

arms, and even for the cannon, there is always a nomad on the horizon of a

given technological lineage*

Obviously, each case is controversial, as demonstrated by the debates on

the stirrup.

The problem is that it is generally difficult to distinguish

between what comes from the nomads as such, and what they receive from

the empire they communicate with, conquer, or integrate with. There are

so many gray areas, intermediaries, and combinations between an imper-

ial army and a nomad war machine that it is often the case that things origi-

nate in the empire. The example of the saber is typical, and unlike the

stirrup, there is no longer any doubt. Although it is true that the Scythians

were the propagators of the saber, introducing it to the Hindus, Persians,

and Arabs, they were also its first victims, they started off on the receiving

end; it was invented by the Chinese empire of the Ch'in and Han dynasties,

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the exclusive master of steel casting or crucible steel.

This is a good exam-

ple to illustrate the difficulties facing modern archaeologists and his-

torians. Even archaeologists are not immune from a certain hatred or

contempt for the nomads. In the case of the saber, where the facts already

speak sufficiently in favor of an imperial origin, the best of the commenta-

tors finds it fitting to add that the Scythians could not have invented it at

any rate—poor nomads that they were—and that crucible steel necessarily

came from a sedentary milieu. But why follow the very old, official Chinese

version according to which deserters from the imperial army revealed the

secrets to the Scythians? And what can "revealing the secret" mean if the

Scythians were incapable of putting it to use, and understood nothing of all

that? Blame the deserters, why don't you. You don't make an atomic bomb

with a secret, any more than you make a saber if you are incapable of repro-

ducing it, and of integrating it under different conditions, of transferring it

to other assemblages. Propagation and diffusion are fully a part of the line

of innovation; they mark a bend in it. On top of that, why say that crucible

steel is necessarily the property of sedentaries or imperial subjects, when it

is first of all the invention of metallurgists? It is assumed that these metal-

lurgists were necessarily controlled by a State apparatus; but they also had

to enjoy a certain technological autonomy, and social clandestinity, so that,

even controlled, they did not belong to the State any more than they were

themselves nomads. There were no deserters who betrayed the secret, but

rather metallurgists who communicated it and made its adaptation and

propagation possible: an entirely different kind of "betrayal." In the last

analysis, what makes the discussions so difficult (both in the controversial

case of the stirrup and in the definite case of the saber) are not only the prej-

udices about the nomads but also the absence of a sufficiently elaborated

concept of the technological lineage (what defines a technological line or
continuum, and its variable extension, from a given standpoint?).

It would be useless to say that metallurgy is a science because it discovers

constant laws, for example, the melting point of a metal at all times and in

all places. For metallurgy is inseparable from several lines of variation: var-

iation between meteorites and indigenous metals; variation between ores

and proportions of metal; variation between alloys, natural and artificial;

variation between the operations performed upon a metal; variation

between the qualities that make a given operation possible, or that result

from a given operation (for example, twelve varieties of copper identified

and inventoried at Sumer by place of origin and degree of refinement).

All of these variables can be grouped under two overall rubrics: singulari-
ties or spatiotemporal haecceities of different orders, and the operations

associated with them as processes of deformation or transformation;
affective qualities or traits ofexpression of different levels, corresponding to

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these singularities and operations (hardness, weight, color, etc.). Let us

return to the example of the saber, or rather of crucible steel. It implies the

actualization of a first singularity, namely, the melting of the iron at high

temperature; then a second singularity, the successive decarbonations; cor-

responding to these singularities are traits of expression—not only the

hardness, sharpness, and finish, but also the undulations or designs traced

by the crystallization and resulting from the internal structure of the cast

steel. The iron sword is associated with entirely different singularities

because it is forged and not cast or molded, quenched and not air cooled,

produced by the piece and not in number; its traits of expression are neces-

sarily very different because it pierces rather than hews, attacks from the

front rather than from the side; even the expressive designs are obtained in

an entirely different way, by inlay.

We may speak of a machinic phylum, or

technological lineage, wherever we find a constellation of singularities,
prolongable by certain operations, which converge, and make the operations
converge, upon one or several assignable traits of expression. If the singulari-

ties or operations diverge, in different materials or in the same material, we

must distinguish two different phyla: this is precisely the case for the iron

sword, descended from the dagger, and the steel saber, descended from the

knife. Each phylum has its own singularities and operations, its own quali-

ties and traits, which determine the relation of desire to the technical ele-

ment (the affects the saber "has" are not the same as those of the sword).

But it is always possible to situate the analysis on the level of singularities

that are prolongable from one phylum to another, and to tie the two phyla

together. At the limit, there is a single phylogenetic lineage, a single

machinic phylum, ideally continuous: the flow of matter-movement, the

flow of matter in continuous variation, conveying singularities and traits

of expression. This operative and expressive flow is as much artificial as

natural: it is like the unity of human beings and Nature. But at the same

time, it is not realized in the here and now without dividing, differentiat-

ing. We will call an assemblage every constellation of singularities and

traits deducted from the flow—selected, organized, stratified—in such a

way as to converge (consistency) artificially and naturally; an assemblage,

in this sense, is a veritable invention. Assemblages may group themselves

into extremely vast constellations constituting "cultures," or even "ages";

within these constellations, the assemblages still differentiate the phyla or

the flow, dividing it into so many different phylas, of a given order, on a

given level, and introducing selective discontinuities in the ideal continu-

ity of matter-movement. The assemblages cut the phylum up into distinct,

differentiated lineages, at the same time as the machinic phylum cuts

across them all, taking leave of one to pick up again in another, or making

them coexist. A certain singularity embedded in the flanks of the phylum,

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for example, the chemistry of carbon, will be brought up to the surface by a

given assemblage that selects, organizes, invents it, and through which all

or part of the phylum passes, at a given place at a given time. We may distin-

guish in every case a number of very different lines. Some of them,

phylogenetic lines, travel long distances between assemblages of various ages

and cultures (from the blowgun to the cannon? from the prayer wheel to

the propeller? from the pot to the motor?); others, ontogenetic lines, are

internal to one assemblage and link up its various elements or else cause

one element to pass, often after a delay, into another assemblage of a differ-

ent nature but of the same culture or age (for example, the horseshoe, which

spread through agricultural assemblages). It is thus necessary to take into

account the selective action of the assemblages upon the phylum, and the

evolutionary reaction of the phylum as the subterranean thread that passes

from one assemblage to another, or quits an assemblage, draws it forward

and opens it up. Vital impulse! Leroi-Gourhan has gone the farthest

toward a technological vitalism taking biological evolution in general as

the model for technical evolution: a Universal Tendency, laden with all of

the singularities and traits of expression, traverses technical and interior

milieus that refract or differentiate it in accordance with the singularities

and traits each of them retains, selects, draws together, causes to converge,

invents.

There is indeed a machinic phylum in variation that creates the

technical assemblages, whereas the assemblages invent the various phyla.

A technological lineage changes significantly according to whether one

draws it upon the phylum or inscribes it in the assemblages; but the two are

inseparable.

So how are we to define this matter-movement, this matter-energy, this

matter-flow, this matter in variation that enters assemblages and leaves

them? It is a destratified, deterritorialized matter. It seems to us that

Husserl brought thought a decisive step forward when he discovered a

region of vague and material essences (in other words, essences that are

vagabond, anexact and yet rigorous), distinguishing them from fixed,

metric and formal, essences. We have seen that these vague essences are as

distinct from formed things as they are from formal essences. They con-

stitute fuzzy aggregates. They relate to a corporeality (materiality) that is

not to be confused either with an intelligible, formal essentiality or a sen-

sible, formed and perceived, thinghood. This corporeality has two char-

acteristics: on the one hand, it is inseparable from passages to the limit as

changes of state, from processes of deformation or transformation that oper-

ate in a space-time itself anexact and that act in the manner of events

(ablation, adjunction, projection . . .); on the other hand, it is inseparable

from expressive or intensive qualities, which can be higher or lower in

degree, and are produced in the manner of variable affects (resistance,

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hardness, weight, color . . .)• There is thus an ambulant coupling,
events-affects, which constitutes the vague corporeal essence and is distinct

from the sedentary linkage, "fixed essence-properties of the thing

deriving from the essence," "formal essence-formed thing." Doubtless

Husserl had a tendency to make the vague essence a kind of intermediary

between the essence and the sensible, between the thing and the concept, a

little like the Kantian schema. Is not roundness a schematic or vague essence,

intermediary between rounded sensible things and the conceptual essence of

the circle? In effect, roundness exists only as a threshold-affect (neither flat

nor pointed) and as a limit-process (becoming rounded), through sensible

things and technical agents, millstone, lathe, wheel, spinning wheel socket,

etc. But it is only "intermediary" to the extent that what is intermediary is

autonomous, initially stretching itself between things, and between

thoughts, to establish a whole new relation between thoughts and things, a
vague identity between the two.

Certain distinctions proposed by Simondon can be compared to those

of Husserl. For Simondon exposes the technological insufficiency of the

matter-form model, in that it assumes a fixed form and a matter deemed

homogeneous. It is the idea of the law that assures the model's coherence,

since laws are what submit matter to this or that form, and conversely,

realize in matter a given property deduced from the form. But Simondon

demonstrates that the hylomorphic model leaves many things, active and

affective, by the wayside. On the one hand, to the formed or formable mat-

ter we must add an entire energetic materiality in movement, carrying sin-
gularities or haecceities that are already like implicit forms that are

topological, rather than geometrical, and that combine with processes of

deformation: for example, the variable undulations and torsions of the

fibers guiding the operation of splitting wood. On the other hand, to the

essential properties of the matter deriving from the formal essence we must

add variable intensive affects, now resulting from the operation, now on the

contrary making it possible: for example, wood that is more or less porous,

more or less elastic and resistant. At any rate, it is a question of surrender-

ing to the wood, then following where it leads by connecting operations to a

materiality, instead of imposing a form upon a matter: what one addresses

is less a matter submitted to laws than a materiality possessing a nomos.

One addresses less a form capable of imposing properties upon a matter

than material traits of expression constituting affects. Of course, it is

always possible to " translate" into a model that which escapes the model;

thus, one may link the materiality's power of variation to laws adapting a

fixed form and a constant matter to one another. But this cannot be done

without a distortion that consists in uprooting variables form the state of

continuous variation, in order to extract from them fixed points and con-

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stant relations. Thus one throws the variables off, even changing the nature

of the equations, which cease to be immanent to matter-movement

(inequations, adequations). The question is not whether such a translation

is conceptually legitimate—it is—but what intuition gets lost in it. In

short, what Simondon criticizes the hylomorphic model for is taking form

and matter to be two terms defined separately, like the ends of two

half-chains whose connection can no longer be seen, like a simple

relation of molding behind which there is a perpetually variable,

continuous modulation that it is no longer possible to grasp.

The critique of

the hylomorphic schema is based on "the existence, between form and

matter, of a zone of medium and intermediary dimension," of energetic,

molecular dimension—a space unto itself that deploys its materiality

through matter, a number unto itself that propels its traits through form.

We always get back to this definition: the machinic phylum is ma-

teriality, natural or artificial, and both simultaneously; it is matter in

movement, in flux, in variation, matter as a conveyor of singularities and

traits of expression. This has obvious consequences: namely, this

matter-flow can only he followed. Doubtless, the operation that consists in

following can be carried out in one place: an artisan who planes follows the

wood, the fibers of the wood, without changing location. But this way of

following is only one particular sequence in a more general process. For

artisans are obliged to follow in another way as well, in other words, to go

find the wood where it lies, and to find the wood with the right kind of

fibers. Otherwise, they must have it brought to them: it is only because

merchants take care of one segment of the journey in reverse that the

artisans can avoid making the trip themselves. But artisans are complete

only if they are also prospectors; and the organization that separates

prospectors, merchants, and artisans already mutilates artisans in order to

make "workers" of them. We will therefore define the artisan as one who

is determined in such a way as to follow a flow of matter, a machinic
phylum. The artisan is the itinerant, the ambulant. To follow the flow of

matter is to itinerate, to ambulate. It is intuition in action. Of course, there

are second-order itinerancies where it is no longer a flow of matter that one

prospects and follows, but, for example, a market. Nevertheless, it is

always a flow that is followed, even if the flow is not always that of

matter. And, above all, there are secondary itinerancies, which derive

from another "condition," even if they are necessarily entailed by it. For

example, a transhumant, whether a farmer or an animal raiser, changes

land after it is worn out, or else seasonally; but transhumants only

secondarily follow a land flow, because they undertake a rotation meant

from the start to return them to the point from which they left, after the

forest has regenerated, the land has rested, the weather has changed.

Transhumants do not follow a flow, they draw a circuit; they only

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follow the part of the flow that enters into the circuit, even an ever-wid-

ening one. Transhumants are therefore itinerant only consequentially, or

become itinerant only when their circuit of land or pasture has been

exhausted, or when the rotation has become so wide that the flows escape

the circuit. Even the merchant is a transhumant, to the extent that mercan-

tile flows are subordinated to the rotation between a point of departure and

a point of arrival (go get-bring back, import-export, buy-sell). Whatever

the reciprocal implications, there are considerable differences between a

flow and a circuit. The migrant, we have seen, is something else again. And

the nomad is not primarily defined as an itinerant or as a transhumant, nor

as a migrant, even though nomads become these consequentially. The pri-

mary determination of nomads is to occupy and hold a smooth space: it is

this aspect that determines them as nomad (essence). On their own

account, they will be transhumants, or itinerants, only by virtue of the

imperatives imposed by the smooth spaces. In short, whatever the de facto

mixes between nomadism, itinerancy, and transhumance, the primary

concept is different in the three cases (smooth space, matter-flow, rota-

tion). It is only on the basis of the distinct concept that we can make a judg-

ment on the mix—on when it is produced, on the form in which it is

produced, and on the order in which it is produced.

But in the course of the preceding discussion, we have wandered from

the question: Why is the machinic phylum, the flow of matter, essentially

metallic or metallurgical? Here again, it is only the distinct concept that

can give us an answer, in that it shows that there is a special, primary rela-

tion between itinerance and metallurgy (deterritorialization). However,

the examples we took from Husserl and Simondon concerned wood and

clay as well as metals. Besides, are there not flows of grass, water, herds,

which form so many phyla or matters in movement? It is easier for us to

answer these questions now. For it is as if metal and metallurgy imposed

upon and raised to consciousness something that is only hidden or buried

in the other matters and operations. The difference is that elsewhere the

operations occur between two thresholds, one of which constitutes the

matter prepared for the operation, and the other the form to be incarnated

(for example, the clay and the mold). The hylomorphic model derives its

general value from this, since the incarnated form that marks the end of an

operation can serve as the matter for a new operation, but in a fixed order

marking a succession of thresholds. In metallurgy, on the other hand, the

operations are always astride the thresholds, so that an energetic

materiality overspills the prepared matter, and a qualitative deformation

or transformation overspills the form.

For example, quenching follows

forging and takes place after the form has been fixed. Or, to take another

example, in molding, the metallurgist in a sense works inside the mold. Or

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again, steel that is melted and molded later undergoes a series of successive

decarbonations. Finally, metallurgy has the option of melting down and

reusing a matter to which it gives an ingot-form: the history of metal is

inseparable from this very particular form, which is not to be confused

with either a stock or a commodity; monetary value derives from it. More

generally, the metallurgical idea of the "reducer" expresses this double lib-

eration of a materiality in relation to a prepared matter, and of a transfor-

mation in relation to the form to be incarnated. Matter and form have

never seemed more rigid than in metallurgy; yet the succession of forms

tends to be replaced by the form of a continuous development, and the var-

iability of matters tends to be replaced by the matter of a continuous varia-

tion. If metallurgy has an essential relation with music, it is by virtue not

only of the sounds of the forge but also of the tendency within both arts to

bring into its own, beyond separate forms, a continuous development of

form, and beyond variable matters, a continuous variation of matter: a

widened chromaticism sustains both music and metallurgy; the musical

smith was the first "transformer."

In short, what metal and metallurgy

bring to light is a life proper to matter, a vital state of matter as such, a mate-

rial vitalism that doubtless exists everywhere but is ordinarily hidden or

covered, rendered unrecognizable, dissociated by the hylomorphic model.

Metallurgy is the consciousness or thought of the matter-flow, and metal

the correlate of this consciousness. As expressed in panmetallism, metal is

coextensive to the whole of matter, and the whole of matter to metallurgy.

Even the waters, the grasses and varieties of wood, the animals are popu-

lated by salts or mineral elements. Not everything is metal, but metal is

everywhere. Metal is the conductor of all matter. The machinic phylum is

metallurgical, or at least has a metallic head, as its itinerant probe-head or

guidance device. And thought is born more from metal than from stone:

metallurgy is minor science in person, "vague" science or the phenom-

enology of matter. The prodigious idea of Nonorganic Life—the very same

idea Worringer considered the barbarian idea par excellence

—was the

invention, the intuition of metallurgy. Metal is neither a thing nor an

organism, but a body without organs. The "Northern, or Gothic, line" is

above all a mining or metallic line delimiting this body. The relation

between metallurgy and alchemy reposes not, as Jung believed, on the sym-

bolic value of metal and its correspondence with an organic soul but on the

immanent power of corporeality in all matter, and on the esprit de corps

accompanying it.

The first and primary itinerant is the artisan. But artisans are neither

hunters, farmers, nor animal raisers. Neither are they winnowers or pot-

ters, who only secondarily take up craft activity. Rather, artisans are those

who follow the matter-flow as pure productivity: therefore in mineral

412 O 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

form, and not in vegetable or animal form. They are not of the land, or of

the soil, but of the subsoil. Because metal is the pure productivity of matter,

those who follow metal are producers of objects par excellence. As demon-

strated by V. Gordon Childe, the metallurgist is the first specialized arti-

san, and in this respect forms a collective body (secret societies, guilds,

journeymen's associations). Artisans-metallurgists are itinerants because

they follow the matter-flow of the subsoil. Of course metallurgists have

relations with "the others," those of the soil, land, and sky. They have rela-

tions with the farmers of the sedentary communities, and with the celestial

functionaries of the empire who overcode those communities; in fact, they

need them to survive, they depend on an imperial agricultural stockpile for

their very sustenance.

But in their work, they have relations with the forest

dwellers, and partially depend on them: they must establish their workshops

near the forest in order to obtain the necessary charcoal. In their space,

they have relations with the nomads, since the subsoil unites the ground
(sol) of smooth space and the land of striated space: there are no mines in

the alluvial valleys of the empire-dominated farmers; it is necessary to

cross deserts, approach the mountains; and the question of control over

the mines always involves nomadic peoples. Every mine is a line of flight

that is in communication with smooth spaces—there are parallels today in

the problems with oil.

Archaeology and history remain strangely silent on this question of the

control over the mines. There have been empires with a strong metallurgi-

cal organization that had no mines; the Near East lacked tin, so necessary

for the fabrication of bronze. Large quantities of metal arrived in ingot

form, and from very far away (for instance, tin from Spain or even from

Cornwall). So complex a situation implies not only a strong imperial

bureaucracy and elaborate long-distance commercial circuits; it also

implies a shifting politics, in which States confront an outside, in which

very different peoples confront one another, or else reach some accommo-

dation on particular aspects of the control of mines (extraction, charcoal,

workshops, transportation). It is not enough to say that there are wars and

mining expeditions; or to invoke "a Eurasian synthesis of the nomadic

workshops from the approaches of China to the tip of Britanny," and

remark that "the nomadic populations had been in contact with the princi-

pal metallurgical centers of the ancient world since prehistoric times."

What is needed is a better knowledge of the nomads' relations with these

centers, with the smiths they themselves employed or frequented, with

properly metallurgical peoples or groups who were their neighbors. What

was the situation in the Caucasus and in the Altai? In Spain and North

Africa? Mines are a source of flow, mixture, and escape with few equiva-

lents in history. Even when they are well controlled by an empire that owns

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them (as in the Chinese and Roman empires), there is a major movement of
clandestine exploitation, and of miners' alliances either with nomad and
barbarian incursions or peasant revolts. The study of myths, and even eth-
nographic considerations on the status of smiths, divert us from these
political questions. Mythology and ethnology do not have the right method
in this regard. It is too often asked how the others "react" to the smith, and
as a result, one succumbs to the usual platitudes about the ambivalence of
feelings; it is said that the smith is simultaneously honored, feared, and
scorned—more or less scorned among the nomads, more or less honored
among the sedentaries.

But this loses sight of the reasons for this situa-

tion, of the specificity of the smiths themselves, of the nonsymmetrical
relation they entertain with the nomads and the sedentaries, the type of
affects they invent (metallic affect). Before looking at the feelings of others
toward smiths, it is necessary to evaluate the smiths themselves as Other;
as such, they have different affective relations with the sedentaries and the
nomads.

There are no nomadic or sedentary smiths. Smiths are ambulant, itiner-

ant. Particularly important in this respect is the way in which smiths live:
their space is neither the striated space of the sedentary nor the smooth
space of the nomad. Smiths may have a tent, they may have a house; they
inhabit them in the manner of an "ore bed" (gite, shelter, home, mineral
deposit), like metal itself, in the manner of a cave or a hole, a hut half or all
underground. They are cave dwellers not by nature but by artistry and
need." A splendid text by Elie Faure evokes the infernal progress of the
itinerant peoples of India as they bore holes in space and create the fantas-
tic forms corresponding to these breakthroughs, the vital forms of
nonorganic life: "There at the shore of the sea, at the base of a mountain,
they encountered a great wall of granite. Then they all entered the granite;
in its shadows they lived, loved, worked, died, were born, and, three or four
centuries afterward, they came out again, leagues away, having traversed
the mountain. Behind them they left the emptied rock, its galleries hol-
lowed out in every direction, its sculptured, chiseled walls, its natural or
artificial pillars turned into a deep lacework with ten thousand horrible or
charming figures.. . . Here man confesses unresistingly his strength and his
nothingness. He does not exact the affirmation of a determined ideal from
form.... He extracts it rough from formlessness, according to the dictates
of the formless. He utilizes the indentations and accidents of the rock."

100

Metallurgical India. Transpierce the mountains instead of scaling them,
excavate the land instead of striating it, bore holes in space instead of keep-
ing it smooth, turn the earth into swiss cheese. An image from the film
Strike [by Eisenstein] presents a holey space where a disturbing group of

Holey Space

people are rising, each emerging from his or her hole as if from a field

mined in all directions. The sign of Cain is the corporeal and affective sign

of the subsoil, passing through both the striated land of sedentary space

and the nomadic ground {sot) of smooth space without stopping at either

one, the vagabond sign of itinerancy, the double theft and double betrayal

of the metallurgist, who shuns agriculture at the same time as animal rais-

ing. Must we reserve the name Cainite for these metallurgical peoples who

haunt the depths of History? Prehistoric Europe was crisscrossed by the
battle-ax people, who came in off the steppes like a detached metallic

branch of the nomads, and the people known for their bell-shaped pottery,

the beaker people, originating in Andalusia, a detached branch of

mega-lithic agriculture.

101

Strange peoples, dolicocephalics and

brachycephalics who mix and spread across all of Europe. Are they the ones

who kept up the mines, boring holes in European space from every

direction, constituting our European space?

Smiths are not nomadic among the nomads and sedentary among the

sedentaries, nor half-nomadic among the nomads, half-sedentary among

sedentaries. Their relation to others results from their internal itinerancy,

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TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE □ 415

from their vague essence, and not the reverse. It is in their specificity, it is

by virtue of their itinerancy, by virtue of their inventing a holey space, that

they necessarily communicate with the sedentaries and with the nomads

(and with others besides, with the transhumant forest dwellers). They are

in themselves double: a hybrid, an alloy, a twin formation. As Griaule says,

Dogon smiths are not "impure" but "mixed," and it is because they are

mixed that they are endogamous, that they do not intermarry with the

pure, who have a simplified progeny while they reconstitute a twin prog-

eny.

102

Childe demonstrates that metallurgists are necessarily doubled,

that they exist two times, once as captured by and maintained within the

apparatus of the oriental empire, again in the Aegean world, where they

were much more mobile and much freer. But the two segments cannot be
separated, simply by relating each of them to their particular context. The

metallurgist belonging to an empire, the worker, presupposes a metallur-

gist-prospector, however far away; and the prospector ties in with a mer-

chant, who brings the metal to the first metallurgist. In addition, the metal

is worked on by each segment, and the ingot-form is common to them all:

we must imagine less separate segments than a chain of mobile workshops

constituting, from hole to hole, a line of variation, a gallery. Thus the met-

allurgists' relation to the nomads and the sedentaries also passes through

the relations they have with other metallurgists.

103

This hybrid metallur-

gist, a weapon- and toolmaker, communicates with the sedentaries and

with the nomads at the same time. Holey space itself communicates with

smooth space and striated space. In effect, the machinic phylum or the

metallic line passes through all of the assemblages: nothing is more

deterritorialized than matter-movement. But it is not at all in the same

way, and the two communications are not symmetrical. Worringer, in the

domain of aesthetics, said that the abstract line took on two quite different

expressions, one in barbarian Gothic art, the other in the organic classical

art. Here, we would say that the phylum simultaneously has two different

modes of liaison: it is always connected to nomad space, whereas it conju-
gates with sedentary space. On the side of the nomadic assemblages and

war machines, it is a kind of rhizome, with its gaps, detours, subterranean

passages, stems, openings, traits, holes, etc. On the other side, the seden-

tary assemblages and State apparatuses effect a capture of the phylum, put

the traits of expression into a form or a code, make the holes resonate

together, plug the lines of flight, subordinate the technological operation to

the work model, impose upon the connections a whole regime of arbor-

escent conjunctions.

XIOM

III. The nomad war machine is the form of expression, of which

itinerant metallurgy is the correlative form of content.

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Content

Expression

Substance

Holey space

(machinic phylum

or matter-flow)

Smooth space

Form

Itinerant

metallurgy

Nomad war

machine

ROPOSITION

IX. War does not necessarily have the battle as its object,

and more important, the war machine does not necessarily have war as
its object, although war and the battle may be its necessary result
(under certain conditions).

We now come to three successive problems. First, is the battle the

"object" of war? But also, is war the "object" of the war machine? And

finally, to what extent is the war machine the "object" of the State appara-

tus? The ambiguity of the first two problems is certainly due to the term

"object," but implies their dependency on the third. We must nevertheless

approach these problems gradually, even if we are reduced to multiplying

examples. The first question, that of the battle, requires an immediate dis-

tinction to be made between two cases: when a battle is sought, and when it

is essentially avoided by the war machine. These two cases in no way coin-

cide with the offensive and the defensive. But war in the strict sense

(according to a conception of it that culminated in Foch) does seem to have

the battle as its object, whereas guerrilla warfare explicitly aims for the
nonbattle. However, the development of war into the war of movement,

and into total war, also places the notion of the battle in question, as much

from the offensive as the defensive points of view: the concept of the

nonbattle seems capable of expressing the speed of a flash attack, and the

counterspeed of an immediate response.

104

Conversely, the development

of guerilla warfare implies a moment when, and forms under which, a bat-

tle must be effectively sought, in connection with exterior and interior

"support points." And it is true that guerrilla warfare and war proper are

constantly borrowing each other's methods and that the borrowings run

equally in both directions (for example, stress has often been laid on the

inspirations land-based guerrilla warfare received from maritime war). All

we can say is that the battle and the nonbattle are the double object of war,

according to a criterion that does not coincide with the offensive and the

defensive, or even with war proper and guerrilla warfare.

That is why we push the question further back, asking if war itself is the

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TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE D 417

object of the war machine. It is not at all obvious. To the extent that war

(with or without the battle) aims for the annihilation or capitulation of

enemy forces, the war machine does not necessarily have war as its object

(for example, the raid can be seen as another object, rather than as a partic-

ular form of war). But more generally, we have seen that the war machine

was the invention of the nomad, because it is in its essence the constitutive

element of smooth space, the occupation of this space, displacement

within this space, and the corresponding composition of people: this is its

sole and veritable positive object (nomos). Make the desert, the steppe,

grow; do not depopulate it, quite the contrary. If war necessarily results, it

is because the war machine collides with States and cities, as forces (of

stri-ation) opposing its positive object: from then on, the war machine has as

its enemy the State, the city, the state and urban phenomenon, and adopts

as its objective their annihilation. It is at this point that the war machine

becomes war: annihilate the forces of the State, destroy the State-form. The

Attila, or Genghis Khan, adventure clearly illustrates this progression

from the positive object to the negative object. Speaking like Aristotle, we

would say that war is neither the condition nor the object of the war

machine, but necessarily accompanies or completes it; speaking like

Derrida, we would say that war is the "supplement" of the war machine. It

may even happen that this supplementarity is comprehended through a

progressive, anxiety-ridden revelation. Such, for example, was the adven-

ture of Moses: leaving the Egyptian State behind, launching into the desert,

he begins by forming a war machine, on the inspiration of the old past of

the nomadic Hebrews and on the advice of his father-in-law, who came

from the nomads. This is the machine of the Just, already a war machine,

but one that does not yet have war as its object. Moses realizes, little by lit-

tle, in stages, that war is the necessary supplement of that machine, because

it encounters or must cross cities and States, because it must send ahead

spies (armed observation), then perhaps take things to extremes (war of
annihilation). Then the Jewish people experience doubt, and fear that they

are not strong enough; but Moses also doubts, he shrinks before the revela-

tion of this supplement. And it will be Joshua, not Moses, who is charged

with waging war. Finally, speaking like Kant, we would say that the relation

between war and the war machine is necessary but "synthetic" (Yahweh is

necessary for the synthesis).

The question of war, in turn, is pushed further back and is subordinated

to the relations between the war machine and the State apparatus. States

were not the first to make war: war, of course, is not a phenomenon one

finds in the universality of Nature, as nonspecific violence. But war is not

the object of States, quite the contrary. The most archaic States do not even

seem to have had a war machine, and their domination, as we will see, was

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based on other agencies (comprising, rather, the police and prisons). It is

safe to assume that the intervention of an extrinsic or nomad war machine

that counterattacked and destroyed the archaic but powerful States was

one of the mysterious reasons for their sudden annihilation. But the State

learns fast. One of the biggest questions from the point of view of universal

history is: How will the State appropriate the war machine, that is, consti-

tute one for itself, in conformity with its size, its domination, and its aims?

And with what risks? (What we call a military institution, or army, is not at

all the war machine in itself, but the form under which it is appropriated by

the State.) In order to grasp the paradoxical character of such an undertak-

ing, we must recapitulate the hypothesis in its entirety. (1) The war

machine is that nomad invention that in fact has war not as its primary

object but as its second-order, supplementary or synthetic objective, in the

sense that it is determined in such a way as to destroy the State-form and

city-form with which it collides. (2) When the State appropriates the war

machine, the latter obviously changes in nature and function, since it is

afterward directed against the nomad and all State destroyers, or else

expresses relations between States, to the extent that a State undertakes

exclusively to destroy another State or impose its aims upon it. (3) It is pre-

cisely after the war machine has been appropriated by the State in this way

that it tends to take war for its direct and primary object, for its "analytic"

object (and that war tends to take the battle for its object). In short, it is at

one and the same time that the State apparatus appropriates a war

machine, that the war machine takes war as its object, and that war be-

comes subordinated to the aims of the State.

This question of appropriation is so varied historically that it is neces-

sary to distinguish between several kinds of problems. The first concerns

the possibility of the operation: it is precisely because war is only the sup-

plementary or synthetic object of the nomad war machine that it experi-

ences the hesitation that proves fatal to it, and that the State apparatus for

its part is able to lay hold of war and thus turn the war machine back against

the nomads. The hesitation of the nomad is legendary: What is to be done

with the lands conquered and crossed? Return them to the desert, to the

steppe, to open pastureland? Or let a State apparatus survive that is capa-

ble of exploiting them directly, at the risk of becoming, sooner or later, sim-

ply a new dynasty of that apparatus: sooner or later because Genghis Khan

and his followers were able to hold out for a long time by partially integrat-

ing themselves into the conquered empires, while at the same time main-

taining a smooth space on the steppes to which the imperial centers were

subordinated. That was their genius, the Pax Mongolica. It remains the

case that the integration of the nomads into the conquered empires was one

of the most powerful factors of appropriation of the war machine by the

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State apparatus: the inevitable danger to which the nomads succumbed.

But there is another danger as well, the one threatening the State when it

appropriates the war machine (all States have felt the weight of this danger,

as well as the risks this appropriation represents for them). Tamerlane is

the extreme example. He was not Genghis Khan's successor but his exact

opposite: it was Tamerlane who constructed a fantastic war machine

turned back against the nomads, but who, by that very fact, was obliged to

erect a State apparatus all the heavier and more unproductive since it

existed only as the empty form of appropriation of that machine.

105

Turn-

ing the war machine back against the nomads may constitute for the State a

danger as great as that presented by nomads directing the war machine

against States.

A second type of problem concerns the concrete forms the appropria-

tion of the war machine takes: Mercenary or territorial? A professional

army or a conscripted army? A special body or national recruiting? Not

only are these formulas not equivalent, but there are all the possible mixes

between them. Perhaps the most relevant distinction to make, or the most

general one, would be: Is there merely "encastment" of the war machine,

or "appropriation" proper? The capture of the war machine by the State

apparatus took place following two paths, by encasting a society of warri-

ors (who arrived from without or arose from within), or on the contrary

by constituting it in accordance with rules corresponding to civil society

as a whole. Once again, there is passage and transition from one formula

to another. Last, the third type of problem concerns the means of appro-

priation. We must consider from this standpoint the various data pertain-

ing to the fundamental aspects of the State apparatus: territoriality, work
or public works, taxation. The constitution of a military institution or an

army necessarily implies a territorialization of the war machine, in other

words, the granting of land ("colonial" or domestic), which can take very

diverse forms. But at the same time, fiscal regimes determine both the

nature of the services and taxes owed by the beneficiary warriors, and

especially the kind of civil tax to which all or part of society is subject for

the maintenance of the army. And the State enterprise of public works

must be reorganized along the lines of a "laying out of the territory" in

which the army plays a determining role, not only in the case of fortresses

and fortified cities, but also in strategic communication, the logistical

structure, the industrial infrastructure, etc. (the role and function of the

Engineer in this form of appropriation).

106

Let us compare this hypothesis as a whole with Clausewitz's formula:

"War is the continuation of politics by other means." As we know, this for-

mula is itself extracted from a theoretical and practical, historic and

transhistoric, aggregate whose parts are interconnected. (1) There is a pure

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concept of war as absolute, unconditioned war, an Idea not given in experi-

ence (bring down or "upset" the enemy, who is assumed to have no other

determination, with no political, economic, or social considerations

entering in). (2) What is given are real wars as submitted to State aims;

States are better or worse "conductors" in relation to absolute war, and in

any case condition its realization in experience. (3) Real wars swing

between two poles, both subject to State politics: the war of annihilation,

which can escalate to total war (depending on the objectives of the annihi-

lation) and tends to approach the unconditioned concept via an ascent to

extremes; and limited war, which is no "less" a war, but one that effects a

descent toward limiting conditions, and can de-escalate to mere "armed

observation."

107

In the first place, the distinction between absolute war as Idea and real

wars seems to us to be of great importance, but only if a different criterion

than that of Clausewitz is applied. The pure Idea is not that of the abstract

elimination of the adversary but that of a war machine that does not have
war as its object and that only entertains a potential or supplementary syn-

thetic relation with war. Thus the nomad war machine does not appear to

us to be one case of real war among others, as in Clausewitz, but on the con-

trary the content adequate to the Idea, the invention of the Idea, with its

own objects, space, and composition of the nomos. Nevertheless it is still

an Idea, and it is necessary to retain the concept of the pure Idea, even

though this war machine was realized by the nomads. It is the nomads,

rather, who remain an abstraction, an Idea, something real and nonactual,

and for several reasons: first, because the elements of nomadism, as we

have seen, enter into de facto mixes with elements of migration, itinerancy,

and transhumance; this does not affect the purity of the concept, but intro-

duces always mixed objects, or combinations of space and composition,

which react back upon the war machine from the beginning. Second, even

in the purity of its concept, the nomad war machine necessarily effectuates

its synthetic relation with war as supplement, uncovered and developed in

opposition to the State-form, the destruction of which is at issue. But that is

exactly it; it does not effectuate this supplementary object or this synthetic

relation without the State, for its part, finding the opportunity to appropri-

ate the war machine, and the means of making war the direct object of this

turned-around machine (thus the integration of the nomad into the State is

a vector traversing nomadism from the very beginning, from the first act of

war against the State).

The question is therefore less the realization of war than the appropria-

tion of the war machine. It is at the same time that the State apparatus
appropriates the war machine, subordinates it to its "political" aims, and

gives it war as its direct object. And it is one and the same historical ten-

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TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE □ 421

dency that causes State to evolve from a triple point of view: going from fig-

ures of encastment to forms of appropriation proper, going from limited

war to so-called total war, and transforming the relation between aim and

object. The factors that make State war total war are closely connected to

capitalism: it has to do with the investment of constant capital in equip-

ment, industry, and the war economy, and the investment of variable capi-

tal in the population in its physical and mental aspects (both as warmaker

and as victim of war).

108

Total war is not only a war of annihilation but

arises when annihilation takes as its "center" not only the enemy army, or

the enemy State, but the entire population and its economy. The fact that

this double investment can be made only under prior conditions of limited

war illustrates the irresistible character of the capitalist tendency to

develop total war.'

It is therefore true that total war remains subordinated

to State political aims and merely realizes the maximal conditions of the

appropriation of the war machine by the State apparatus. But it is also true

that when total war becomes the object of the appropriated war machine,

then at this level in the set of all possible conditions, the object and the aim

enter into new relations that can reach the point of contradiction. This

explains Clausewitz's vacillation when he asserts at one point that total war

remains a war conditioned by the political aim of States, and at another

that it tends to effectuate the Idea of unconditioned war. In effect, the aim

remains essentially political and determined as such by the State, but the

object itself has become unlimited. We could say that the appropriation

has changed direction, or rather that States tend to unleash, reconstitute,

an immense war machine of which they are no longer anything more than

the opposable or apposed parts. This worldwide war machine, which in a

way "reissues" from the States, displays two successive figures: first, that of

fascism, which makes war an unlimited movement with no other aim than

itself; but fascism is only a rough sketch, and the second, postfascist, figure

is that of a war machine that takes peace as its obj ect directly, as the peace of

Terror or Survival. The war machine reforms a smooth space that now

claims to control, to surround the entire earth. Total war itself is surpassed,

toward a form of peace more terrifying still. The war machine has taken

charge of the aim, worldwide order, and the States are now no more than

objects or means adapted to that machine. This is the point at which

Clausewitz's formula is effectively reversed; to be entitled to say that poli-

tics is the continuation of war by other means, it is not enough to invert the

order of the words as if they could be spoken in either direction; it is neces-

sary to follow the real movement at the conclusion of which the States, hav-

ing appropriated a war machine, and having adapted it to their aims,

reimpart a war machine that takes charge of the aim, appropriates the

States, and assumes increasingly wider political functions.

110

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Doubtless, the present situation is highly discouraging. We have

watched the war machine grow stronger and stronger, as in a science fiction

story; we have seen it assign as its objective a peace still more terrifying

than fascist death; we have seen it maintain or instigate the most terrible of

local wars as parts of itself; we have seen it set its sights on a new type of

enemy, no longer another State, or even another regime, but the "unspeci-

fied enemy"; we have seen it put its counterguerrilla elements into place, so

that it can be caught by surprise once, but not twice. Yet the very conditions

that make the State or World war machine possible, in other words, con-

stant capital (resources and equipment) and human variable capital,

continually recreate unexpected possibilities for counterattack, unfore-

seen initiatives determining revolutionary, popular, minority, mutant

machines. The definition of the Unspecified Enemy testifies to this: "mul-

tiform, maneuvering and omnipresent... of the moral, political, subversive

or economic order, etc.," the unassignable material Saboteur or human

Deserter assuming the most diverse forms."' The first theoretical element

of importance is the fact that the war machine has many varied meanings,

and this is precisely because the war machine has an extremely variable
relation to war itself. The war machine is not uniformly defined, and

comprises something other than increasing quantities of force. We have

tried to define two poles of the war machine: at one pole, it takes war for its

object and forms a line of destruction prolongable to the limits of the

universe. But in all of the shapes it assumes here—limited war, total war,

worldwide organization—war represents not at all the supposed essence of

the war machine but only, whatever the machine's power, either the set of

conditions under which the States appropriate the machine, even going so

far as to project it as the horizon of the world, or the dominant order of

which the States themselves are now only parts. The other pole seemed to be

the essence; it is when the war machine, with infinitely lower "quantities,"

has as its object not war but the drawing of a creative line of flight, the com-

position of a smooth space and of the movement of people in that space. At

this other pole, the machine does indeed encounter war, but as its supple-

mentary or synthetic object, now directed against the State and against the

worldwide axiomatic expressed by States.

We thought it possible to assign the invention of the war machine to the

nomads. This was done only in the historical interest of demonstrating that

the war machine as such was invented, even if it displayed from the begin-

ning all of the ambiguity that caused it to enter into composition with the

other pole, and swing toward it from the start. However, in conformity with

the essence, the nomads do not hold the secret: an "ideological," scientific,

or artistic movement can be a potential war machine, to the precise extent

to which it draws, in relation to aphylum, a plane of consistency, a creative

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TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE □ 423

line of flight, a smooth space of displacement. It is not the nomad who

defines this constellation of characteristics; it is this constellation that

defines the nomad, and at the same time the essence of the war machine. If

guerrilla warfare, minority warfare, revolutionary and popular war are in

conformity with the essence, it is because they take war as an object all the

more necessary for being merely "supplementary": they can make war only
on the condition that they simultaneously create something else, if only new

nonorganic social relations. The difference between the two poles is great,

even, and especially, from the point of view of death: the line of flight that

creates, or turns into a line of destruction; the plane of consistency that

constitutes itself, even piece by piece, or turns into a plan(e) of organiza-

tion and domination. We are constantly reminded that there is communi-

cation between these two lines or planes, that each takes nourishment from

the other, borrows from the other: the worst of the world war machines

reconstitutes a smooth space to surround and enclose the earth. But the

earth asserts its own powers of deterritorialization, its lines of flight, its

smooth spaces that live and blaze their way for a new earth. The question is

not one of quantities but of the incommensurable character of the quanti-

ties that confront one another in the two kinds of war machine, according

to the two poles. War machines take shape against the apparatuses that

appropriate the machine and make war their affair and their object: they

bring connections to bear against the great conjunction of the apparatuses

of capture or domination.

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B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE □ 425

Pompidou?). This is not to say that one has exclusive right to signs, the

other to tools. The fearsome emperor is already the master of large-scale

works; the wise king takes up and transforms the entire regime of signs.

What it means is that the combination, signs-tools, constitutes the differ-

ential trait of political sovereignty, or the complementarity of the State.

2. Of course, the two men of State are always getting mixed up in affairs of

war. But either the magic emperor sends to battle warriors who are not his

own, whom he takes into his service by capture; or, more important,

when he makes his appearance on the battlefield, he suspends the use of

weapons, he throws his net over the warriors, his single eye throws them

into petrified catatonia, "he binds without combat," he encasts the war

machine (this State capture is not to be confused with the captures of war:

conquests, prisoners, spoils).

As for the other pole, the jurist-king is a great

organizer of war; but he gives it laws, lays out a field for it, makes it princi-

pled, imposes a discipline upon it, subordinates it to political ends. He

turns the war machine into a military institution, he appropriates the war

machine for the State apparatus.

We should not be too hasty in speaking of

a softening, a humanization: on the contrary, this is perhaps when the war

machine has only one remaining object, that of war itself. Violence is found

everywhere, but under different regimes and economies. The violence of

the magic emperor: his knot, his net, his way of "making his moves once

and for all" ... The violence of the jurist-king: his way of beginning over

again every move, always with attention to ends, alliances, and laws... All

things considered, the violence of the war machine might appear softer and

more supple than that of the State apparatus because it does not yet have

war as its "object," because it eludes both poles of the State. That is why the

man of war, in his exteriority, is always protesting the alliances and pacts of

the jurist-king, as well as severing the bonds of the magic emperor. He is

equally an unbinder and a betrayer: twice the traitor.

He has another econ-

omy, another cruelty, but also another justice, another pity. To the signs

and tools of the State, the man of war opposes his weapons and jewelry.

Once again, who could say which is better and which is worse? It is true that

war kills, and hideously mutilates. But it is especially true after the State

has appropriated the war machine. Above all, the State apparatus makes

the mutilation, and even death, come first. It needs them

preaccom-plished, for people to be born that way, crippled and zombielike.

The myth of the zombie, of the living dead, is a work myth and not a war

myth. Mutilation is a consequence of war, but it is a necessary condition, a

presupposition of the State apparatus and the organization of work (hence

the native infirmity not only of the worker but also of the man of State

himself, whether of the One-Eyed or the One-Armed type): "The brutal

exhibition of severed flesh shocked me.... Wasn't it an integral part of

technical per-

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7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

fection and the intoxication of it. . . ? Mankind has waged wars since the

world began, but I can't remember one single example in the Iliad where

the loss of an arm or a leg is reported. Mythology reserved mutilation for

monsters, for human beasts of the race of Tantalus or Procrustes.... It is an

optical illusion to attribute these mutilations to accidents. Actually, acci-

dents are the result of mutilations that took place long ago in the embryo of

our world; and the increase in amputations is one of the symptoms bearing

witness to the triumph of the morality of the scalpel. The loss occurred long

before it was visibly taken into account."

The State apparatus needs, at its

summit as at its base, predisabled people, preexisting amputees, the still-

born, the congenitally infirm, the one-eyed and one-armed.

Thus there is a tempting three-part hypothesis: the war machine is

"between" the two poles of political sovereignty and assures the passage

from one pole to the other. It is indeed in that order, 1-2-3, that things seem

to present themselves in myth and history. Take two versions of the

One-Eyed and the One-Armed gods analyzed by Dumezil: (1) the god Odin,

who has a single eye, ties up the wolf of war and holds him in his magic

bond; (2) but the wolf is wary and has at its disposal all its power of

exteriority; (3) the god Tyr gives the wolf a legal security by leaving one of

his hands in the wolfs mouth so the wolf can bite it off if it does not

succeed in extricating itself from the bond. (1) Horatius Codes, the

One-Eyed, using only his face, his grimace and magic power, prevents

the Etruscan commander from attacking Rome; (2) the war commander

then decides to lay siege; (3) Mucius Scaevola takes a political tack,

offering his hand as a security in order to persuade the warrior that it

would be best to abandon the siege and conclude a pact.

In an entirely different, historical, context, Marcel Detienne suggests an

analogous schema in three moments for ancient Greece: (1) The magic sov-

ereign, the "Master of Truth," has at his disposal a war machine that doubt-

less does not originate with him, and which enjoys a relative autonomy

within his empire; (2) this class of warriors has its own rules, defined by

"isonomy," an isotropic space, and a "milieu" (war spoils are in the middle
[au milieu], he who speaks places himself in the middle of the assembly);

this is another space, the rules are different from those of the sovereign,

who captures and speaks from on high; (3) the hoplite reform, the ground-

work for which was laid in the warrior class, spread throughout the social

body, promoting the formation of an army of citizen-soldiers; at the same

time, the last vestiges of the imperial pole of sovereignty were replaced by

the juridical pole of the city-state (with isonomy as its law, and isotropy as

its space).

Thus in every case, the war machine seems to intervene

"between" the two poles of the State apparatus, assuring and necessitating

the passage from one to the other.

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B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE □ 427

We cannot, however, assign this schema a causal meaning (the authors

cited do not do so). In the first place, the war machine explains nothing; for

it is either exterior to the State, and directed against it; or else it already

belongs to the State, encasted and appropriated, and presupposes it. If the

war machine has a part in the evolution of the State, it is therefore necessar-

ily in conjunction with other internal factors. And this is the second point:

if there is an evolution of the State, the second pole, the evolved pole, must

be in resonance with the first, it must continually recharge it in some way,

and the State must have only one milieu of interiority; in other words, it

must have a unity of composition, in spite of all the differences in organiza-

tion and development among States. It is even necessary for each State to

have both poles, as the essential moments of its existence, even though the

organization of the two varies. Third, if we call this interior essence or this

unity of the State "capture," we must say that the words "magic capture"

describe the situation well because it always appears as preaccomplished

and self-presupposing; but how is this capture to be explained then, if it

leads back to no distinct assignable cause? That is why theses on the origin

of the State are always tautological. At times, exogenous factors, tied to war

and the war machine, are invoked; at times endogenous factors, thought to

engender private property, money, etc.; and at times specific factors,

thought to determine the formation of "public functions." All three of

these theses are found in Engels, in relation to a conception of the diversity

of the roads to Domination. But they beg the question. War produces the

State only if at least one of the two parts is a preexistent State; and the

organization of war is a State factor only if that organization is a part of the

State. Either the State has no war machine (and has policemen and jailers

before having soldiers), or else it has one, but in the form of a military insti-

tution or public function.

Similarly, private property presupposes State

public property, it slips through its net; and money presupposes taxation. It

is even more difficult to see how public functions could have existed before

the State they imply. We are always brought back to the idea of a State that

comes into the world fully formed and rises up in a single stroke, the uncon-

ditioned Urstaat.

ROPOSITION

XI. Which comes first?

We shall call the first pole of capture imperial or despotic. It corresponds

to Marx's Asiatic formation. Archaeology discovers it everywhere, often

lost in oblivion, at the horizon of all systems or States—not only in Asia,

but also in Africa, America, Greece, Rome. Immemorial Urstaat, dating as

far back as Neolithic times, and perhaps farther still. Following the Marxist

description: a State apparatus is erected upon the primitive agricultural

communities, which already have lineal-territorial codes; but it overcodes

428 D

7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

them, submitting them to the power of a despotic emperor, the sole and

transcendent public-property owner, the master of the surplus or the stock,

the organizer of large-scale works (surplus labor), the source of public func-

tions and bureaucracy. This is the paradigm of the bond, the knot. Such is

the regime of signs of the State: overcoding, or the Signifier. It is a system of
machinic enslavement: the first "megamachine" in the strict sense, to use

Mumford's term. A prodigious success in a single stroke; other States will

be mere runts measured against this model. The emperor-despot is not a

king or a tyrant; these will come into existence only as a function of private

property once it has arisen.

In the imperial regime, everything is public:

ownership of land is communal, each individual is an owner only insofar as

he or she is a member of the community; the eminent property of the des-

pot is that of the supposed Unity of the communities; and the functionaries

themselves have land only if it comes with their position (although the

position may be hereditary). Money may exist, notably in the form of the

tax that the functionaries owe the emperor, but it is not used for

buying-selling, since land does not exist as an alienable commodity. This

is the regime of the nexum, the bond: something is lent or even given

without a transfer of ownership, without private appropriation, and the

compensation for it does not come in the form of interest or profit for the

donor but rather as a "rent" that accrues to him, accompanying the lending

of something for another's use or the granting of revenue.

Marx, the historian, and Childe, the archaeologist, are in agreement on

the following point: the archaic imperial State, which steps in to overcode

agricultural communities, presupposes at least a certain level of devel-

opment of these communities' productive forces since there must be a

potential surplus capable of constituting a State stock, of supporting a spe-

cialized handicrafts class (metallurgy), and of progressively giving rise to

public functions. That is why Marx links the archaic State to a certain

"mode of production." However, the origin of these Neolithic States is still

being pushed back in time. What is at issue when the existence of

near-Paleolithic empires is conjectured is not simply the quantity of time;

the qualitative problem changes. Catal Hiiyiik, in Anatolia, makes

possible a singularly reinforced imperial paradigm: it is a stock of

uncultivated seeds and relatively tame animals from different territories

that performs, and makes it possible to perform, at first by chance,

hybridizations and selections from which agriculture and small-scale
animal raising arise.

It is easy to see the significance of this change in the

givens of the problem. It is no longer the stock that presupposes a potential

surplus, but the other way around. It is no longer the State that

presupposes advanced agricultural communities and developed forces of

production. On the contrary, the State is established directly in a milieu of

hunter-gatherers having no prior

7000

B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE □ 429

agriculture or metallurgy, and it is the State that creates agriculture, animal

raising, and metallurgy; it does so first on its own soil, then imposes them

upon the surrounding world. It is not the country that progressively creates

the town but the town that creates the country. It is not the State that pre-

supposes a mode of production; quite the opposite, it is the State that

makes production a "mode." The last reasons for presuming a progressive

development are invalidated. Like seeds in a sack: It all begins with a

chance intermixing. The "state and urban revolution" may be Paleolithic,

not Neolithic as Childe believed.

Evolutionism has been challenged in many different ways (zigzag move-

ments, stages skipped here or there, irreducible overall breaks). We have

seen in particular how Pierre Clastres tried to shatter the evolutionist

framework by means of the following two theses: (1) societies termed prim-

itive are not societies without a State, in the sense that they failed to reach a

certain stage, but are counter-State societies organizing mechanisms that

ward off the State-form, which make its crystallization impossible; (2)

when the State arises, it is in the form of an irreducible break, since it is not

the result of a progressive development of the forces of production (even

the "Neolithic revolution" cannot be defined in terms of an economic

infrastructure).

However, one does not depart from evolutionism by

establishing a clean break. In the final state of his work, Clastres main-

tained the preexistence and autarky of counter-State societies, and attrib-

uted their workings to an overmysterious presentiment of what they

warded off and did not yet exist. More generally, one marvels at the bizarre

indifference that ethnology manifests for archaeology. It seems as though

ethnologists, fenced off in their respective territories, are willing to com-

pare their territories in an abstract, or structural, way, if it comes to that,

but refuse to set them against archaeological territories that would com-

promise their autarky. They take snapshots of their primitives but rule out

in advance the coexistence and superposition of the two maps, the

ethnographical and the archaeological. Catal Hiiyuk, however, would have

had a zone of influence extending two thousand miles; how can the

ever-recurring problem of the relation of coexistence between primitive

societies and empires, even those of Paleolithic times, be left unattended

to? As long as archaeology is passed over, the question of the relation

between ethnology and history is reduced to an idealist confrontation, and

fails to wrest itself from the absurd theme of society without history, or

society against history. Everything is not of the State precisely because
there have been States always and everywhere. Not only does writing

presuppose the State, but so do speech and language. The self-sufficiency,

autarky, independence, preexistence of primitive communities, is an

ethnological dream: not that these communities necessarily depend on

States, but they

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7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

coexist with them in a complex network. It is plausible that "from the

beginning" primitive societies have maintained distant ties to one another,

not just short-range ones, and that these ties were channeled through

States, even if States effected only a partial and local capture of them.

Speech communities and languages, independently of writing, do not

define closed groups of people who understand one another but primarily

determine relations between groups who do not understand one another: if

there is language, it is fundamentally between those who do not speak the

same tongue. Language is made for that, for translation, not for communi-

cation. And in primitive societies there are as many tendencies that "seek"

the State, as many vectors working in the direction of the State, as there are

movements within the State or outside it that tend to stray from it or guard

themselves against it, or else to stimulate its evolution, or else already to

abolish it: everything coexists, in perpetual interaction.

Economic evolutionism is an impossibility; even a ramified evolution,

"gatherers—hunters—animal breeders—farmers-industrialists," is hardly

believable. An evolutionary ethnology is no better: "nomads—

seminomads—sedentaries." Nor an ecological evolutionism: "dispersed

autarky of local groups—villages and small towns—cities—States." All we

need to do is combine these abstract evolutions to make all of evolutionism

crumble; for example, it is the city that creates agriculture, without going

through small towns. To take another example, the nomads do not precede

the sedentaries; rather, nomadism is a movement, a becoming that affects

sedentaries, just as sedentarization is a stoppage that settles the nomads.

Griaznov has shown in this connection that the most ancient nomadism

can be accurately attributed only to populations that abandoned their

semiurban sedentarity, or their primitive itineration, to set off nomadiz-

ing.

It is under these conditions that the nomads invented the war

machine, as that which occupies or fills nomad space and opposes towns

and States, which its tendency is to abolish. Primitive peoples already had

mechanisms of war that converged to prevent the State formation; but

these mechanisms change when they gain autonomy in the form of a spe-

cific nomadism machine that strikes back against the States. We cannot,

however, infer from this even a zigzag evolution that would go from primi-

tive peoples to States, from States to nomad war machines; or at least the

zigzagging is not successive but passes through the loci of a topology that

defines primitive societies here, States there, and elsewhere war machines.

And even when the State appropriates the war machine, once again chang-

ing its nature, it is a phenomenon of transport, of transfer, and not one of

evolution. The nomad exists only in becoming, and in interaction; the

same goes for the primitive. All history does is to translate a coexistence

of becomings into a succession. And collectivities can be transhumant,

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B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE □ 431

semisedentary, sedentary, or nomadic, without by the same token being

preparatory stages for the State, which is already there, elsewhere or

beside.

Can it at least be said that the hunter-gatherers are the "true" primitives

and remain in spite of it all the basis or minimal presupposition of the State

formation, however far back in time we place it? This point of view can be

maintained only at the price of a very inadequate conception of causality.

And it is true that the human sciences, with their materialist, evolutionary,

and even dialectical schemas, lag behind the richness and complexity of

causal relations in physics, or even in biology. Physics and biology present

us with reverse causalities that are without finality but testify nonetheless

to an action of the future on the present, or of the present on the past, for

example, the convergent wave and the anticipated potential, which imply

an inversion of time. More than breaks or zigzags, it is these reverse causal-

ities that shatter evolution. Similarly, in the present context, it is not ade-

quate to say that the Neolithic or even Paleolithic State, once it appeared,

reacted back on the surrounding world of the hunter-gatherers; it was

already acting before it appeared, as the actual limit these primitive socie-

ties warded off, or as the point toward which they converged but could not

reach without self-destructing. These societies simultaneously have vec-

tors moving in the direction of the State, mechanisms warding it off, and a

point of convergence that is repelled, set outside, as fast as it is approached.

To ward off is also to anticipate. Of course, it is not at all in the same way

that the State appears in existence, and that it preexists in the capacity of a

warded-off limit; hence its irreducible contingency. But in order to give a

positive meaning to the idea of a "presentiment" of what does not yet exist,

it is necessary to demonstrate that what does not yet exist is already in

action, in a different form than that of its existence. Once it has appeared,

the State reacts back on the hunter-gatherers, imposing upon them agricul-

ture, animal raising, an extensive division of labor, etc.; it acts, therefore, in

the form of a centrifugal or divergent wave. But before appearing, the State

already acts in the form of the convergent or centripetal wave of the

hunter-gatherers, a wave that cancels itself out precisely at the point of
convergence marking the inversion of signs or the appearance of the State

(hence the functional and intrinsic instability of these primitive societies).

It is necessary from this standpoint to conceptualize the

contemporaneousness or coexistence of the two inverse movements, of

the two directions of time—of the primitive peoples "before" the State,

and of the State "after" the primitive peoples—as if the two waves that seem

to us to exclude or succeed each other unfolded simultaneously in an

"archaeological," micropo-litical, micrological, molecular field.

There exist collective mechanisms that simultaneously ward off and

432 □

7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

anticipate the formation of a central power. The appearance of a central

power is thus a function of a threshold or degree beyond which what is

anticipated takes on consistency or fails to, and what is conjured away

ceases to be so and arrives. This threshold of consistency, or of constraint,

is not evolutionary but rather coexists with what has yet to cross it. More-

over, a distinction must be made between different thresholds of consis-

tency: the town and the State, however complementary, are not the same

thing. The "urban revolution" and the "state revolution" may coincide but

do not meld. In both cases, there is a central power, but it does not assume

the same figure. Certain authors have made a distinction between the pala-

tial or imperial system (temple-palace), and the urban, town system. In

both cases there is a town, but in one case the town is an outgrowth of the

palace or temple, and in the other case the palace, the temple, is a concre-

tion of the town. In one case, the town par excellence is the capital, and in

the other it is the metropolis. Sumer already attests to a town solution, as

opposed to the imperial solution of Egypt. But to an even greater extent, it

was the Mediterranean world, with the Pelasgians, Phoenicians, Greeks,

Carthaginians, that created an urban fabric distinct from the imperial

organisms of the Orient.

Once again, the question is one not of evolution

but of two thresholds of consistency that are themselves coexistent. They

differ in several respects.

The town is the correlate of the road. The town exists only as a function

of circulation, and of circuits; it is a remarkable point on the circuits that

create it, and which it creates. It is defined by entries and exits; something

must enter it and exit from it. It imposes a frequency. It effects a polariza-

tion of matter, inert, living or human; it causes the phylum, the flow, to pass

through specific places, along horizontal lines. It is a phenomenon of
transconsistency, a network, because it is fundamentally in contact with

other towns. It represents a threshold of deterritorialization, because what-

ever the material involved, it must be deterritorialized enough to enter the

network, to submit to the polarization, to follow the circuit of urban and

road recoding. The maximum deterritorialization appears in the tendency

of maritime and commercial towns to separate off from the backcountry,

from the countryside (Athens, Carthage, Venice). The commercial charac-

ter of the town has often been emphasized, but the commerce in question is

also spiritual, as in a network of monasteries or temple-cities. Towns are

circuit-points of every kind, which enter into counterpoint along horizon-

tal lines; they effect a complete but local, town-by-town, integration. Each

one constitutes a central power, but it is a power of polarization or of the

middle {milieu), of forced coordination. That is why this kind of power has

egalitarian pretensions, regardless of the form it takes: tyrannical, demo-

cratic, oligarchic, aristocratic. Town power invents the idea of the magis-

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trature, which is very different from the State civil-service sector
(fonction-nariat).

Who can say where the greatest civil violence resides?

The State indeed proceeds otherwise: it is a phenomenon of

intracon-sistency. It makes points resonate together, points that are not

necessarily already town-poles but very diverse points of order, geographic,

ethnic, linguistic, moral, economic, technological particularities. It makes

the town resonate with the countryside. It operates by stratification; in

other words, it forms a vertical, hierarchized aggregate that spans the

horizontal lines in a dimension of depth. In retaining given elements, it

necessarily cuts off their relations with other elements, which become

exterior, it inhibits, slows down, or controls those relations; if the State has

a circuit of its own, it is an internal circuit dependent primarily upon

resonance, it is a zone of recurrence that isolates itself from the remainder

of the network, even if in order to do so it must exert even stricter controls

over its relations with that remainder. The question is not to find out

whether what is retained is natural or artificial (boundaries), because in

any event there is deterntorialization. But in this case deterritorialization

is a result of the territory itself being taken as an object, as a material to

stratify, to make resonate. Thus the central power of the State is

hierarchical, and constitutes a civil-service sector; the center is not in the

middle {au milieu), but on top, because the only way it can recombine

what it isolates is through subordination. Of course, there is a multiplicity

of States no less than of towns, but it is not the same type of multiplicity:

there are as many States as there are vertical cross sections in a

dimension of depth, each separated from the others, whereas the town is

inseparable from the horizontal network of towns. Each State is a global

(not local) integration, a redundancy of resonance (not of frequency), an

operation of the stratification of the territory (not of the polarization of the

milieu).

It is possible to reconstruct how primitive societies warded off both

thresholds while at the same time anticipating them. Levi-Strauss has

shown that the same villages are susceptible to two presentations, one

segmentary and egalitarian, the other encompassing and hierarchized.

These are like two potentials, one anticipating a central point common to

two horizontal segments, the other anticipating a central point external to

a straight line.

Primitive societies do not lack formations of power; they

even have many of them. But what prevents the potential central points

from crystallizing, from taking on consistency, are precisely those mecha-

nisms that keep the formations of power both from resonating together in a

higher point and from becoming polarized at a common point: the circles

are not concentric, and the two segments require a third segment through

which to communicate.

This is the sense in which primitive societies

have crossed neither the town-threshold nor the State-threshold.

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If we now turn our attention to the two thresholds of consistency, it is

clear that they imply a deterritorialization in relation to the primitive ter-

ritorial codes. It is futile to ask which came first, the city or the State, the

urban or state revolution, because the two are in reciprocal presupposi-

tion. Both the melodic lines of the towns and the harmonic cross sections

of the States are necessary to effect the striation of space. The only ques-

tion that arises is the possibility that there may be an inverse relation at

the heart of this reciprocity. For although the archaic imperial State nec-

essarily included towns of considerable size, they remained more or less

strictly subordinated to the State, depending on how complete the State's

monopoly over foreign trade was. On the other hand, the town tended to

break free when the State's overcoding itself provoked decoded flows. A

decoding was coupled with the deterritorialization, and amplified it; the

necessary recoding was then achieved through a certain autonomy of the

towns, or else directly through corporative and commercial towns freed

from the State-form. Thus towns arose that no longer had a connection to

their own land, because they assured the trade between empires, or better,

constituted on their own a free commercial network with other towns.

There is therefore an adventure specific to towns in the zones where the

most intense decoding occurs, for example, the ancient Aegean world or

the Western world of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Could it not

be said that capitalism is the fruit of the towns, and arises when an urban

recoding tends to replace State overcoding? This, however, was not the

case. The towns did not create capitalism. The banking and commercial

towns, being unproductive and indifferent to the backcountry, did not

perform a recoding without also inhibiting the general conjunction of

decoded flows. If it is true that they anticipated capitalism, they in turn

did not anticipate it without also warding it off. They do not cross this

new threshold. Thus it is necessary to expand the hypothesis of mecha-

nisms both anticipatory and inhibiting: these mechanisms are at play not

only in primitive societies but also in the conflict of towns "against" the

State and "against" capitalism. Finally, it was through the State-form and

not the town-form that capitalism triumphed; this occurred when the

Western States became models of realization for an axiomatic of decoded

flows, and in that way resubjugated the towns. As Braudel says, there were
"always two runners, the state and the town"—two forms and two speeds

of deterritorialization—and "the state usually won. . . . everywhere in

Europe, it disciplined the towns with instinctive relentlessness, whether

or not it used violence.. . . [The states] caught up with the forward gallop

of the towns."

But the relation is a reciprocal one: if it is the modern

State that gives capitalism its models of realization, what is thus realized

is an independent, worldwide axiomatic that is like a single City,

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megalopolis, or "megamachine" of which the States are parts, or neigh-

borhoods.

We define social formations by machinic processes and not by modes of

production (these on the contrary depend on the processes). Thus primi-

tive societies are defined by mechanisms of prevention-anticipation; State

societies are defined by apparatuses of capture; urban societies, by instru-

ments of polarization; nomadic societies, by war machines; and finally

international, or rather ecumenical, organizations are defined by the

encompassment of heterogeneous social formations. But precisely because

these processes are variables of coexistence that are the object of a social

topology, the various corresponding formations are coexistent. And they

coexist in two fashions, extrinsically and intrinsically. Primitive societies

cannot ward off the formation of an empire or State without anticipating it,

and they cannot anticipate it without its already being there, forming part

of their horizon. And States cannot effect a capture unless what is captured

coexists, resists in primitive societies, or escapes under new forms, as

towns or war machines. . . The numerical composition of the war machine

is superposed upon the primitive lineal organization and simultaneously

opposes the geometric organization of the State and the physical organiza-

tion of the town. It is this extrinsic coexistence—interaction—that is

brought to its own expression in international aggregates. For these obvi-

ously did not wait for capitalism before forming: as early as Neolithic

times, even Paleolithic, we find traces of ecumenical organizations that tes-

tify to the existence of long-distance trade, and simultaneously cut across

the most varied of social formations (as we have seen in the case of metal-

lurgy). The problem of diffusion, or of diffusionism, is badly formulated if

one assumes a center at which the diffusion would begin. Diffusion occurs

only through the placing in communication of potentials of very different

orders: all diffusion happens in the in-between, goes between, like every-

thing that "grows" of the rhizome type. An international ecumenical

organization does not proceed from an imperial center that imposes itself

upon and homogenizes an exterior milieu; neither is it reducible to rela-

tions between formations of the same order, between States, for example

(the League of Nations, the United Nations). On the contrary, it constitutes

an intermediate milieu between the different coexistent orders. Therefore

it is not exclusively commercial or economic, but is also religious, artistic,

etc. From this standpoint, we shall call an international organization any-

thing that has the capacity to move through diverse social formations

simultaneously: States, towns, deserts, war machines, primitive societies.

The great commercial formations in history do not simply have city-poles,

but also primitive, imperial, and nomadic segments through which they

pass, perhaps issuing out again in another form. Samir Amin is totally cor-

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7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

rect in saying that there can be no economic theory of international rela-

tions, even economic ones, because they sit astride heterogeneous forma-

tions.

The point of departure for ecumenical organization is not a State,

even an imperial one; the imperial State is only one part of it, and it consti-

tutes a part of it in its own mode, according to its own order, which consists

in capturing everything it can. It does not proceed by progressive

homoge-nization, or by totalization, but by the taking on of consistency or

the consolidation of the diverse as such. For example, monotheistic

religion is distinguished from territorial worship by its pretension to

universality. But this pretension is not homogenizing, it makes itself felt

only by spreading everywhere; this was the case with Christianity, which

became imperial and urban, but not without giving rise to bands, deserts,

war machines of its own.

Similarly, there is no artistic movement that

does not have its towns and empires, but also its nomads, bands, and

primitives.

It might be objected that, at least in the case of capitalism, international

economic relations, and at the limit all international relations, tend toward

the homogenization of social formations. One could cite not only the cold

and concerted destruction of primitive societies but also the fall of the last

despotic formations, for example, the Ottoman Empire, which met capi-

talist demands with too much resistance and inertia. This objection, how-

ever, is only partially accurate. To the extent that capitalism constitutes an

axiomatic (production for the market), all States and all social formations

tend to become isomorphic in their capacity as models of realization: there

is but one centered world market, the capitalist one, in which even the

so-called socialist countries participate. Worldwide organization thus

ceases to pass "between" heterogeneous formations since it assures the

isomorphy of those formations. But it would be wrong to confuse

isomorphy with homogeneity. For one thing, isomorphy allows, and even

incites, a great heterogeneity among States (democratic, totalitarian, and,

especially, "socialist" States are not facades). For another thing, the

international capitalist axiomatic effectively assures the isomorphy of the

diverse formations only where the domestic market is developing and

expanding, in other words, in "the center." But it tolerates, in fact it

requires, a certain peripheral polymorphy, to the extent that it is not satu-

rated, to the extent that it actively repels its own limits;

this explains the

existence, at the periphery, of heteromorphic social formations, which cer-
tainly do not constitute vestiges or transitional forms since they realize an

ultramodern capitalist production (oil, mines, plantations, industrial

equipment, steel, chemistry), but which are nonetheless precapitalist, or

extracapitalist, owing to other aspects of their production and to the forced

inadequacy of their domestic market in relation to the world market.

When international organization becomes the capitalist axiomatic, it con-

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tinues to imply a heterogeneity of social formations, it gives rise to and

organizes its "Third World."

There is not only an external coexistence of formations but also an

intrinsic coexistence of machinic processes. Each process can also function

at a "power" other than its own; it can be taken up by a power correspond-

ing to another process. The State as apparatus of capture has a power of
appropriation; but this power does not consist solely in capturing all that it

can, all that is possible, of a matter defined as phylum. The apparatus of

capture also appropriates the war machine, the instruments of polariza-

tion, and the anticipation-prevention mechanisms. This is to say, con-

versely, that anticipation-prevention mechanisms have a high power of
transference: they are at work not only in primitive societies, but move into

the towns that ward off the State-form, into the States that ward off capital-

ism, into capitalism itself, insofar as it wards off and repels its own limits.

And they are not satisfied to switch over to other powers but form new focal

points of resistance and contagion, as we have seen in the case of "band"

phenomena, which have their own towns, their own brand of international-

ism, etc. Similarly, war machines have a power of metamorphosis, which of

course allows them to be captured by States, but also to resist that capture

and rise up again in other forms, with other "objects" besides war (revolu-

tion?). Each power is a force of deterritorialization that can go along with

the others or go against them (even primitive societies have their vectors of

deterritorialization). Each process can switch over to other powers, but

also subordinate other processes to its own power.

ROPOSITION

XII. Capture.

Is it possible to conceive of an "exchange" between separate primitive

groups, independent of any reference to such notions as stock, labor, and

commodity? It seems that a modified marginalism provides a basis for a

hypothesis. For the interest of marginalism resides not in its economic the-

ory, which is extremely weak, but in a logical power that makes Jevons, for

example, a kind of Lewis Carroll of economics. Take two abstract groups,

one of which (A) gives seeds and receives axes, while the other (B) does the

opposite. What is the collective evaluation of the objects based on? It is

based on the idea of the last objects received, or rather receivable, on each

side. By "last" or "marginal" we must understand not the most recent, nor

the final, but rather the penultimate, the next to the last, in other words, the

last one before the apparent exchange loses its appeal for the exchangers, or

forces them to modify their respective assemblages, to enter another

assemblage. We will consider that the farmer-gatherer group A, which

receives axes, has an "idea" of the number of axes that would force it to

change assemblage; and the manufacturing group B, of the quantity of

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seeds that would force it to change assemblage. We may say, then, that the

seed-ax relation is determined by the last quantity of seeds (for group B)

corresponding to the last ax (for group A). The last as the object of a collec-

tive evaluation determines the value of the entire series. It marks the exact

point at which the assemblage must reproduce itself, begin a new operation

period or a new cycle, lodge itself on another territory, and beyond which

the assemblage could not continue as such. This is indeed a

next-to-the-last, a penultimate, since it comes before the ultimate. The

ultimate is when the assemblage must change its nature: B would have to

plant the excess seeds. A would have to increase the rhythm of its own

plantings and remain on the same land.

We can now posit a conceptual difference between the "limit" and the

"threshold": the limit designates the penultimate marking a necessary

rebeginning, and the threshold the ultimate marking an inevitable change.

It is an economic given of every enterprise to include an evaluation of the

limit beyond which the enterprise would have to modify its structure.

Marginalism claims to demonstrate the frequency of this penultimate

mechanism: it applies not only to the last exchangeable objects but also to

the last producible object, or the last producer him- or herself, the marginal

or limit-producer before the assemblage changes.

This is an economics of

everyday life. For example, what does an alcoholic call the last glass? The

alcoholic makes a subjective evaluation of how much he or she can tolerate.

What can be tolerated is precisely the limit at which, as the alcoholic sees it,

he or she will be able to start over again (after a rest, a pause ...). But

beyond that limit there lies a threshold that would cause the alcoholic to

change assemblage: it would change either the nature of the drinks or the

customary places and hours of the drinking. Or worse yet, the alcoholic

would enter a suicidal assemblage, or a medical, hospital assemblage, etc.

It is of little importance that the alcoholic may be fooling him- or herself, or

makes a very ambiguous use of the theme "I'm going to stop," the theme of

the last one. What counts is the existence of a spontaneous marginal crite-

rion and marginalist evaluation determining the value of the entire series

of "glasses." The same goes for having the last wordin a domestic-squabble

assemblage. Both partners evaluate from the start the volume or density of

the last word that would give them the advantage and conclude the discus-

sion, marking the end of an operation period or cycle of the assemblage,

allowing it to start all over again. Both calculate their words in accordance

with their evaluation of this last word, and the vaguely agreed time for it to

come. And beyond the last (penultimate) word there lie still other words,

this time final words that would cause them to enter another assemblage,

divorce, for example, because they would have overstepped "bounds." The

same could be said for the last love. Proust has shown how a love can be ori-

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B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE □ 439

ented toward its own limit, its own margin: it repeats its own ending. A new

love follows, so that each love is serial, so that there is a series of loves.

But once again, "beyond" lies the ultimate, at the point where the assem-

blage changes, where the assemblage of love is superseded by an artistic

assemblage—the Work to be written, which is the problem Proust

tackles...

Exchange is only an appearance: each partner or group assesses the

value of the last receivable object (limit-object), and the apparent equiva-

lence derives from that. The equalization results from the two heterogene-

ous series, the exchange or communication results from two monologues
(palabre). There is neither exchange value nor use value but rather an eval-

uation of the last by both parties (a calculation of the risk involved in cross-

ing the limit), an anticipation-evaluation that takes into account the ritual

character as well as the utilitarian, the serial character as well as the

exchangist. The evaluation of the limit is there from the start in both

groups, and already governs the first "exchange" between them. Of course

there is groping in the dark; the evaluation is inseparable from a collective

feeling out. But it does not bear on the quantity of social labor but on the

idea of the last on both sides; the speed with which it is accomplished var-

ies, but it is always done faster than the time necessary effectively to arrive

at the last object, or even to pass from one operation to another.

This is

the sense in which the evaluation is essentially anticipatory, that it is

already present in the first terms of the series. It can be seen that marginal

utility (pertaining to the last objects receivable on both sides) is relative not

to an abstractly posited stock but to the respective assemblages of the two

groups. Pareto was moving in this direction when he spoke of "ophelimity"

rather than of marginal utility.

The issue is one ofdesirability as an assem-

blage component: every group desires according to the value of the last

receivable object beyond which it would be obliged to change assemblage.

And every assemblage has two sides, the machining of bodies or objects,

and group enunciation. The evaluation of the last is the collective enuncia-

tion to which the entire series of objects corresponds; in other words, it is an

assemblage cycle or operation period. Exchangist primitive groups thus

appear to be serial groups. Theirs is a special regime, even with respect to

violence. For even violence can be submitted to a marginal ritual treat-

ment, that is, to an evaluation of the "last violence" insofar as it impreg-

nates the entire series of blows (beyond which another regime of violence

would begin). We previously defined primitive societies by the existence of
anticipation-prevention mechanisms. Now we can see more clearly how

these mechanisms are constituted and distributed: it is the evaluation of

the last as limit that constitutes an anticipation and simultaneously wards

off the last as threshold or ultimate (a new assemblage).

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The threshold comes "after" the limit, "after" the last receivable objects:

it marks the moment when the apparent exchange is no longer of interest.

We believe that it is precisely at this moment that stockpiling begins; be-

forehand, there may be exchange granaries, granaries specifically for

exchange purposes, but there is no stock in the strict sense. Exchange does

not assume a preexistent stock, it assumes only a certain "elasticity." Stock-

piling begins only once exchange has lost its interest, its desirability for

both parties. Additionally, conditions must exist giving stockpiling an

interest in its own right, a desirability of its own (otherwise, the objects

would be destroyed or depleted rather than stockpiled: depletion is the

means by which primitive groups ward off the stock and maintain their

assemblage). The stock depends on a new type of assemblage. The expres-

sions "after," "new," "to be superseded" are doubtless very ambiguous. The

threshold is in fact already there, but outside the limit, which is satisfied to

place the threshold at a distance, keep it at a distance. The problem is to

know what this other assemblage is that gives the stock an actual interest, a

desirability. The stock seems to us to have a necessary correlate: either the
coexistence of simultaneously exploited territories, or a succession of exploi-
tations on one and the same territory. It is at this point that the territories

form a Land, are superseded by a Land. This is the assemblage that neces-

sarily includes stockpiling, and which constitutes in the first case an exten-

sive system of cultivation, in the second case an intensive system of

cultivation (following Jane Jacobs's paradigm). The way in which the

stock-threshold differs from the exchange-limit is now clear: primitive

assemblages of hunter-gatherers have an operation period defined by the

exploitation of a territory; the law is one of temporal succession because

the assemblage perseveres only by switching territories at the conclusion of

each operation period (itinerancy, itineration); and within each operation

period there is a repetition or temporal series that tends toward the last

object as an "index," as the marginal or limit-object of the territory (this

iteration will govern the apparent exchange). On the other hand, in the

other assemblage, in the stock assemblage, the law is one of spatial coexis-

tence and concerns the simultaneous exploitation of different territories;

or, when the exploitation is successive, the succession of operation periods

bears on one and the same territory; and in the framework of each opera-

tion period or exploitation the force of serial iteration is superseded by a

power of symmetry, reflection, and global comparison. In solely descrip-

tive terms, we therefore distinguish between serial, itinerant, or territorial

assemblages (which operate by codes) and sedentary, global, or Land

assemblages (which operate by overcoding).

Ground rent, in its abstract model, appears precisely when a compari-

son is drawn between different simultaneously exploited territories, or

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between the successive exploitations of the same territory. The worst land

(or the poorest exploitation) bears no rent, but it makes it so that the other

soils do bear rent, "produce" it in a comparative way.

A stock is what per-

mits the yields to be compared (the same planting on different soils, or

various successive plantings on the same soil). The category of the last con-

firms once again its economic importance, but it has totally changed mean-

ing: it no longer designates the end point of a self-fulfilling movement but

the center of symmetry for two movements, one of which is descending and

the other ascending; it no longer designates the limit of an ordinal series

but the lowest element in a cardinal set, that set's threshold—the least fer-

tile land in the set of simultaneously exploited lands.

Ground rent

homogenizes, equalizes different conditions of productivity by linking the

excess of the highest conditions of productivity over the lowest to a land-
owner: since the price (profit included) is established on the basis of the

least productive land, rent taps the surplus profit accruing to the best lands;

it taps "the difference between the product of two equal amounts of capital

and labor."

This is the very model of an apparatus of capture, inseparable

from a process of relative deterritorialization. The land as the object of

agriculture in fact implies a deterritorialization, because instead of people

being distributed in an itinerant territory, pieces of land are distributed

among people according to a common quantitative criterion (the fertility

of plots of equal surface area). That is why the earth, unlike other elements,

forms the basis of a striation, proceeding by geometry, symmetry, and com-

parison. The other elements, water, air, wind, and subsoil, cannot be stri-

ated and for that very reason bear rent only by virtue of their emplacement,

in other words, as a function of the land.

The land has two potentialities

of deterritorialization: (1) its differences in quality are comparable to one

another, from the standpoint of a quantity establishing a correspondence

between them and exploitable pieces of land; (2) the set of exploited lands

is appropriable, as opposed to exterior unclaimed land, from the stand-

point of a monopoly that fixes the landowner or -owners.

The second

potentiality is the necessary condition for the first. Both were warded off

by the territory's territorialization of the earth but are now effectuated in

the agricultural assemblage thanks to stockpiling, by means of a deter-

ritorialization of the territory. Land as compared and appropriated ex-

tracts from the territories a center of convergence located outside them; the

land is an idea of the town.

Rent is not the only apparatus of capture. The stock has as its correlate

not only the land, from the double point of view of the comparison of lands

and the monopolistic appropriation of land; it has work as another corre-

late, from the double point of view of the comparison of activities and the

monopolistic appropriation of labor (surplus labor). Once again, it is by

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virtue of the stock that activities of the "free action" type come to be com-

pared, linked, and subordinated to a common and homogeneous quantity

called labor. Not only does labor concern the stock—either its constitu-

tion, conservation, reconstitution, or utilization—but labor itself is stock-

piled activity, just as the worker is a stockpiled "actant." Moreover, even

when labor is clearly separated from surplus labor, they cannot be held to

be independent: there is no so-called necessary labor, and beyond that sur-

plus labor. Labor and surplus labor are strictly the same thing; the first term

is applied to the quantitative comparison of activities, the second to the

monopolistic appropriation of labor by the entrepreneur (and no longer

the landowner). As we have seen, even when they are distinct and separate,

there is no labor that is not predicated on surplus labor. Surplus labor is not

that which exceeds labor; on the contrary, labor is that which is subtracted

from surplus labor and presupposes it. It is only in this context that one

may speak of labor value, and of an evaluation bearing on the quantity of

social labor, whereas primitive groups were under a regime of free action or

activity in continuous variation. Since it depends on surplus labor and sur-

plus value, entrepreneurial profit is just as much an apparatus of capture as

proprietary rent: not only does surplus labor capture labor, and

landownership the earth, but labor and surplus labor are the apparatus of

capture of activity, just as the comparison of lands and the appropriation of

land are the apparatus of capture of the territory.

Finally, there is a third apparatus of capture in addition to rent and

profit: taxation. To understand this third form, and its creative range, we

must first determine the internal relation upon which the commodity

depends. Edouard Will has shown, in relation to the Greek city and in par-

ticular the Corinthian tyranny, that money derived not from exchange, the

commodity, or the demands of commerce, but from taxation, which first

introduces the possibility of an equivalence money = goods or services and

which makes money a general equivalent. In effect, money is a correlate of

the stock; it is a subset of the stock in that it can be constituted by any object

that can be preserved over the long term. In the case of Corinth, metal

money was first distributed to the "poor" (in their capacity as producers).

who used it to by land rights; it thus passed into the hands of the "rich," on

the condition that it not stop there, that everyone, rich and poor, pay a tax,

the poor in goods or services, the rich in money, such that an equivalence

money-goods and services was established.

We will return to the signifi-

cance of this reference to rich and poor in the already late case of Corinth. But

beyond the context and particularities of this example, money is always

distributed by an apparatus of power under conditions of conservation,

circulation, and turnover, so that an equivalence goods-services-money

can be established. We therefore do not believe in a succession.

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according to which labor rent would come first, followed by rent in kind,
followed by money rent.

It is directly in taxation that the equivalence and

simultaneity of the three develop. As a general rule, it is taxation that
monetarizes the economy; it is taxation that creates money, and it neces-
sarily creates it in motion, in circulation, with turnover, and also in a corre-
spondence with services and goods in the current of that circulation. The
State finds in taxation the means for foreign trade, insofar as it appropri-
ates that trade. Yet it is not from trade but from taxation that the
money-form derives.

And the money-form thus derived from taxation

makes possible a monopolistic appropriation of outside exchange by the
State (monetarized trade). Everything is different in the regime of
exchanges. We are no longer in the "primitive" situation where exchange is
carried out indirectly, subjectively, through the respective equalization of
the last receivable objects (the law of demand). Of course, exchange
remains what it is in essence, that is to say, unequal, productive of an
equalization resulting from inequality: but this time there is direct
comparison, objective pricing, and monetary equalization (the law of
supply). It is through taxation that goods and services come to be like
commodities, and the commodity comes to be measured and equalized by
money. That is why, even today, the meaning and impact of taxation
appear in what is called indirect taxation, in other words, a tax that is
included in the price and influences the value of the commodity,
independent of and outside the market.

However, the indirect tax is not

simply an additional element that is tacked onto prices and inflates them. It
is only the index or expression of a deeper movement, in which the tax
constitutes the first layer of an "objective" price, the monetary magnet to
which the other elements—price, rent, and profit—add on and adhere,
converging in the same apparatus of capture. It was a great moment in
capitalism when the capitalists realized that taxation could be productive,
that it could be particularly favorable to profits and even to rents. But as
with indirect taxation, this is a favorable case; it should not obscure an
even deeper and more archaic accord, a convergence and essential identity
between three aspects of a single apparatus. A three-headed apparatus of
capture, a "trinity formula" derived from that of Marx (although it
distributes things differently):

LAND

(as opposed to territory)

a) Direct comparison of lands, dif-

ferential rent;

b) Monopolistic appropriation of

land, absolute rent.

Rent The

Landowner

444 D 7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

WORK

(as opposed to activity)

Stock a) Direct comparison of activities,

Profit

labor;

The Entrepreneur

b) Monopolistic appropriation of

labor, surplus labor.

MONEY (as

opposed to exchange)

a) Direct comparison of the objects

exchanged, the commodity;

Taxation

b) Monopolistic appropriation of the

The Banker

means of comparison, the issu

ance of currency.

1. The stock has three simultaneous aspects: land and seeds, tools,

money. Land is stockpiled territory, the tool is stockpiled activity, and

money is stockpiled exchange. But the stock does not come from either ter-

ritories, activities, or exchanges. It marks another assemblage; it comes

from that other assemblage.

2. That assemblage is the "megamachine," or the apparatus of capture,

the archaic empire. It functions in three modes, which correspond to the

three aspects of the stock: rent, profit, taxation. And the three modes con-

verge and coincide in it, in an agency of overcoding (or signifiance): the

despot, at once the eminent landowner, entrepreneur of large-scale proj-

ects, and master of taxes and prices. This is like three capitalizations of

power, or three articulations of "capital."

3. What forms the apparatus of capture are two operations always

found in the convergent modes: direct comparison and monopolistic

appropriation. And the comparison always presupposes the appropriation:

labor presupposes surplus labor; differential rent presupposes absolute

rent; commercial money presupposes taxation. The apparatus of capture

constitutes a general space of comparison and a mobile center of

appropriation. This is a white wall/black hole system of the kind that, as we

have seen, constitutes the face of the despot. A point of resonance circu-

lates in a space of comparison and constitutes that space as it circulates.

That is what distinguishes the State apparatus from primitive mecha-

nisms, with their noncoexistent territories and nonresonating centers.

What begins with the State or the apparatus of capture is a general

semiology that overcodes the primitive semiotic systems. Instead of traits

of expression that follow a machinic phylum and wed it in a distribution of

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singularities, the State constitutes a form of expression that subjugates the

phylum: the phylum or matter is no longer anything more than an equa-

lized, homogenized, compared content, while expression becomes a form

of resonance or appropriation. Apparatus of capture—the semiological

operation par excellence... (In this sense, the associationist philosophers

were not wrong in explaining political power by operations of the mind

dependent upon the association of ideas.)

Bernard Schmitt has proposed a model of the apparatus of capture that

takes into account the operations of comparison and appropriation. This

model admittedly revolves around money as a capitalist economics. But it

seems to be based on abstract principles that transcend these limits.

A. The point of departure is an undivided flow that has yet to be ap

propriated or compared, a "pure availability," "nonpossession and non-

wealth": this is precisely what occurs when banks create money, but taken

more generally it is the establishment of the stock, which is the creation of

an undivided flow.

B. The undivided flow becomes divided to the extent it is allocated to

the "factors," distributed to the "factors." There is only one kind of factor,

the immediate producers. We could call them the "poor" and say that the

flow is distributed among the poor. But this would be inaccurate because

there are no preexistent "rich." What counts, the important thing, is that

the producers do not yet acquire possession of what is distributed to them,

and that what is distributed to them is not yet wealth: remuneration

assumes neither comparison and appropriation, nor buying-selling; it is

much more an operation of the nexum type. There is only equality between

set B and set A, between the distributed set and the undivided set. The dis

tributed set could be called nominal wage; nominal wages are the form of

expression of the entire undivided set ("the entire nominal expression," or

as it is often put, "the expression of total national income"). This is the

point at which the apparatus of capture becomes semiological.

C. Thus it cannot even be said that wages, conceived as distribution,

remuneration, constitute a purchase; on the contrary, purchasing power

derives from wages: "The remuneration of the producers is not a purchase,

it is the operation by which purchasing becomes possible in a second

moment, when money begins to exercise its new power." It is after it has

been distributed that set B becomes wealth, or acquires a comparative

power, in relation to something else entirely. This something else is the

determinate set of the goods that have been produced and are thus purchas

able. At first heterogeneous to goods and products, money later becomes a

good homogeneous to the products it can buy; it acquires a purchasing

power that is extinguished with the real purchase. Or more generally,

between the two sets, the distributed set B and the set of real goods C, there

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is established a correspondence, a comparison ("the power of acquisition is

created in direct conjunction with the set of real productions").

D. This is where the mystery or the magic resides, in a kind of disjunc-

tion. For if we call B' the comparative set, in other words, the set placed in

correspondence with the real goods, we see that it is necessarily smaller

than the distributed set. B' is necessarily smaller than B: even if we assume

that purchasing power has available to it all of the objects produced during

a given period, the distributed set is always greater than the set that is used

or compared, meaning that the immediate producers are able to convert

only a portion of the distributed set. Real wages are only a portion of nomi-

nal wages; similarly, "useful" labor is only a portion of labor, and "utilized"

land is only a portion of the land that has been distributed. We shall call

Capture this difference or excess constitutive of profit, surplus labor, or the

surplus product: "Nominal wages include everything, but the wage-earners

retain only the income they succeed in converting into goods; they lose the

income siphoned off by the enterprises." It can be said that the whole was in

fact distributed to the "poor"; the poor, however, find themselves extorted

of everything they do not succeed in converting in the course of this strange

race: the capture effects an inversion of the wave or of the divisible flow. It

is precisely capture that is the object of monopolistic appropriation. And

this appropriation (by the "rich") does not come after: it is included in

nominal wages, while eluding real wages. It is between the two, it inserts

itself between the distribution without possession and the conversion by

correspondence or comparison; it expresses the difference in power

between the two sets, between B' and B. In the end, there is no mystery at

all: the mechanism of capture contributes from the outset to the constitution
of the aggregate upon which the capture is effectuated.

This schema, according to its author, is very difficult to understand, and

yet it is operative. It consists in bringing into relief an abstract machine of

capture or of extortion by presenting a very specific "order of reasons." For

example, remuneration is not itself a purchase since purchasing power

derives from it. As Schmitt says, there is neither thief nor victim, for the

producer only loses what he does not have and has no chance of acquiring:

as in seventeenth-century philosophy, there are negations but not priva-

tion .. . And everything coexists in this logical apparatus of capture. Any

succession is purely logical: the capture in itself appears between B and C,

but exists as well between A and B, between C and A; it impregnates the

entire apparatus, it acts as a nonlocalizable liaison for the system. The

same goes for surplus labor: How could one specify its location since labor

presupposes it? Now the State—the archaic imperial State in any case—is

this very apparatus. It is always a mistake to appeal to a supplementary

explanation for the State: this pushes the State back behind the State, ad

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infinitum. It is better to leave it where it is from the start, for it exists punc-

tually, beyond the limit of the primitive series. It is enough for this point of

comparison and appropriation to be effectively occupied in order for the

apparatus of capture to function, an apparatus that overcodes the primi-

tive codes, substitutes sets for the series, or reverses the direction of the

signs. This point is necessarily occupied, effectuated, because it already

exists in the convergent wave that moves through the primitive series and

draws them toward a threshold at which, after passing their limits, the wave

itself changes direction. Primitive peoples have always existed only as ves-

tiges, already plied by the reversible wave that carries them off (vector of

deterritorialization). What is contingent upon external circumstances is

only the place where the apparatus is effectuated—the place where the

agricultural "mode of production" was able to arise: the Orient. It is in this

sense that the apparatus is abstract. But in itself, it marks not simply an

abstract possibility of reversibility but the real existence of a point of inver-

sion as an autonomous, irreducible phenomenon.

Hence the very particular character of State violence: it is very difficult

to pinpoint this violence because it always presents itself as

preaccom-plished. It is not even adequate to say that the violence rests with

the mode of production. Marx made the observation in the case of

capitalism: there is a violence that necessarily operates through the State,

precedes the capitalist mode of production, constitutes the "primitive

accumulation," and makes possible the capitalist mode of production itself.

From a standpoint within the capitalist mode of production, it is very

difficult to say who is the thief and who the victim, or even where the

violence resides. That is because the worker is born entirely naked and

the capitalist objectively "clothed," an independent owner. That which gave

the worker and the capitalist this form eludes us because it operated in other

modes of production. It is a violence that posits itself as preaccomplished,

even though it is reactivated every day.

This is the place to say it, if ever

there was one: the mutilation is prior, preestablished. However, these

analyses of Marx should be enlarged upon. For the fact remains that there

is a primitive accumulation that, far from deriving from the agricultural

mode of production, precedes it: as a general rule, there is primitive

accumulation whenever an apparatus of capture is mounted, with that very

particular kind of violence that creates or contributes to the creation of

that which it is directed against, and thus presupposes itself.

The problem

then becomes one of distinguishing between regimes of violence. We can

draw a distinction between struggle, war, crime and policing as so many

regimes of violence. Struggle would be like the regime of primitive

violence (including primitive "wars"); it is a blow-by-blow violence,

which is not without its code, since the value of the blows is fixed according

to the law of the series, as a function of the value of

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7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

the last exchangeable blow, or of the last woman to conquer, etc. Thus there

is a certain ritualization of violence. War, at least when linked to the war

machine, is another regime, because it implies the mobilization and

autonomization of a violence directed first and essentially against the

State apparatus (the war machine is in this sense the invention of a primary

nomadic organization that turns against the State). Crime is something

else, because it is a violence of illegality that consists in taking possession of

something to which one has no "right," in capturing something one does

not have a "right" to capture. But State policing or lawful violence is some-

thing else again, because it consists in capturing while simultaneously

constituting a right to capture. It is an incorporated, structural violence

distinct from every kind of direct violence. The State has often been

defined by a "monopoly of violence," but this definition leads back to

another definition that describes the State as a "state of Law"
(Rechts-staat). State overcoding is precisely this structural violence that

defines the law, "police" violence and not the violence of war. There is

lawful violence wherever violence contributes to the creation of that which

it is used against, or as Marx says, wherever capture contributes to the

creation of that which it captures. This is very different from criminal

violence. It is also why, in contradistinction to primitive violence, State or

lawful violence always seems to presuppose itself, for it preexists its own

use: the State can in this way say that violence is "primal," that it is simply a

natural phenomenon the responsibility for which does not lie with the

State, which uses violence only against the violent, against

"criminals"—against primitives, against nomads—in order that peace

may reign.

ROPOSITION

XIII. The State and its forms.

We start with the archaic imperial State: overcoding, apparatus of cap-

ture, machine of enslavement. It comprises a particular kind of property,

money, public works—a formula complete in a single stroke but one that

presupposes nothing "private" and does not even assume a preexistent

mode of production since it is what gives rise to the mode of production.

The point of departure that the preceding analyses give us is well estab-

lished by archaeology. The question now becomes: Once the State has

appeared, formed in a single stroke, how will it evolve? What are its factors

of evolution or mutation, and what is the relation between evolved States

and the archaic imperial State?

The principle of evolution is internal, whatever the external factors that

contribute to it. The archaic State does not overcode without also freeing a
large quantity of decoded flows that escape from it. Let us recall that "decod-

ing" does not signify the state of a flow whose code is understood (compris)

(deciphered, translatable, assimilable), but, in a more radical sense, the

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B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE D 449

state of a flow that is no longer contained in (compris dans) it own code, that
escapes it own code. On the one hand, when the primitive codes cease to be
self-regulating and are subordinated to the higher agency, flows that had been
coded in a relative way by the primitive communities find the opportunity to
escape. But on the other hand, the overcoding of the archaic State itself makes
possible and gives rise to new flows that escape from it. The State does not
created large-scale works without a flow of independent labor escaping its
bureaucracy (notably in the mines and in metallurgy). It does not create the
monetary form of the tax without flows of money escaping, and nourishing or
bringing into being other powers (notably in commerce and banking). And above
all, it does not created a system of public property without a flow of private
appropriation growing up beside it, then beginning to pass beyond its grasp; this
private property does not itself issue from the archaic system but is constituted
on the margins, all the more necessarily and inevitably, slipping through the net
of overcoding. It is undoubtedly Tokei who has formulated the problem of an
origin of private property in the most serious way, in the context of a system that
seems to exclude it from every angle. For private property can arise neither on
the side of the emperor-despot not on the side of the peasants, whose autonomy
is tied to communal possession, nor on the side of the functionaries whose
existence and income are based on that public communal form ("the aristocrats
can under these conditions become petty despots but not private landowners").
Even the slaves belong to the community or the public function. The question
then becomes, Are there people who are constituted in the overcoding empire,
but constituted as necessarily excluded and decoded? Tokei's answer is the freed
slaves. It is they who have no place. It is their lamentations that are heard the
length and breadth of the Chinese Empire: the plaint (elegy) has always been a
political factor. But it is also they who form the first seeds of private property,
who develop trade, and with metallurgy invent a kind of private slavery in which
they will be the new master.

We saw previously the role played by freed slaves

in the war machine, in the formation of the special body. It is in a different form,
and following entirely different principles, that they play an important role in the
State apparatus and in the evolution of that apparatus, this time in the formation
of a private body. The two aspects can combine, but they belong to two different
lines.

What counts is not the particular case of the freed slave.What counts is the

collective figure of the Outsider. What counts is that in one way or another the
apparatus of overcoding gives rise to flows that are themselves decoded—flows
of money, labor, property. . . These flows are the correlate of the apparatus. And
the correlation is not only social, internal to the archaic empire, it is also
geographical. This would be the place to bring up

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7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE

the confrontation between the East and the West. According to V. Gordon

Childe's great archaeological thesis, the archaic imperial State implies a

stockpiled agricultural surplus, which makes possible the maintenance of a

specialized body of mercantile and metallurgical artisans. Indeed, the sur-

plus as the content proper to overcoding must be not only stockpiled but

absorbed, consumed, realized. Doubtless, this economic requirement that

the surplus be absorbed is one of the principal aspects of the appropriation

of the war machine by the imperial State: The military institution is from

the start one of the most effective means of absorbing surplus. If, however,

we assume that the bureaucratic and military institutions are not enough,

the way is cleared for this specialized body of nonagricultural artisans,

whose labor will reinforce the sedentarization of agriculture. It was in

Afro-Asia and the Orient that all of these conditions were fulfilled and

that the State apparatus was invented: in the Middle East, Egypt, and

Mesopotamia, but also in the valley of the Indus (and in the Far East). That

was where agricultural stock and its bureaucratic, military, but also

metallurgical and commercial concomitants came into being. But this

oriental or imperial "solution" is threatened by an impasse: State

overcoding keeps the metallurgists, both craft and mercantile, within strict

bounds, under powerful bureaucratic control, with monopolistic

appropriation of foreign trade in the service of a ruling class, so that the

peasants themselves benefit little from the State innovations. So it is

indeed true that the State-form spreads and that archaeology discovers it

everywhere on the horizon of Western history in the Aegean world. But

not under the same conditions. Minos and Mycenae are more a caricature

of an empire, Agamemnon of Mycenae is not the Chinese emperor or

Egyptian pharaoh; the Egyptian can say to the Greeks: "You will always

be like children..." That is because the Aegean peoples were both too far

away to fall into the oriental sphere and too poor to stockpile a surplus

themselves, but neither far enough away nor impoverished enough to

ignore the markets of the Orient. Moreover, oriental overcoding itself

assigned its merchants a long-distance role. Thus the Aegean peoples

found themselves in a situation where they could take advantage of the

oriental agricultural stock without having to constitute one for themselves:

they plundered it when they could, and on a more regular basis procured a

share of it in exchange for raw materials (notably wood and metals),

coming from as far away as Central and Western Europe. Of course, the

Orient continually had to reproduce its stocks; but formally, it had made a

move "once and for all," from which the West benefited without having to

reproduce it. It follows that the metallurgical artisans and the merchants

assumed an entirely different status in the West, since their existence did

not directly depend on a surplus accumulated by a local State apparatus:

even if the peasant suffered an exploitation as bad as or worse

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B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE □ 451

than that of the Orient, the artisan and the merchant enjoyed a freer status

and a more diversified market, prefiguring a middle class. Many metallur-

gists and merchants from the Orient moved to the Aegean world, where

they were to find freer, more varied and more stable conditions. In short,
the same flows that are overcoded in the Orient tend to become decoded in
Europe, in a new situation that is like the flipside or correlate of the other.

Surplus value is no longer surplus value of code (overcoding) but becomes

surplus value of flow. It is as if two solutions were found for the same prob-

lem, the Oriental solution and then the Western one, which grafts itself

upon the first and brings it out of the impasse while continuing to presup-

pose it. The European metallurgist and merchant faced a much less thor-

oughly coded international market, one not limited to an imperial house or

class. And as Childe said, the Western and Aegean States were immersed in

a supranational economic system from the start; they bathed in it, instead

of containing it within the limits of their own net.

It is indeed another pole of the State that arises, one that could be

defined in summary fashion as follows. The public sphere no longer charac-

terizes the objective nature of property but is instead the shared means for

a now private appropriation; this yields the public-private mixes constitu-

tive of the modern world. The bond becomes personal; personal relations of

dependence, both between owners (contracts) and between owned and

owners (conventions), parallel or replace community relations or relations

based on one's public function. Even slavery changes; it no longer defines

the public availability of the communal worker but rather private property

as applied to individual workers.

The law in its entirety undergoes a

mutation, becoming subjective, conjunctive, "topical" law: this is because

the State apparatus is faced with a new task, which consists less in

overcoding already coded flows than in organizing conjunctions of decoded
flows as such. Thus the regime of signs has changed: in all of these respects,

the operation of the imperial "signifier" has been superseded by processes
of subjedification; machinic enslavement tends to be replaced by a regime

of social subjection. And unlike the relatively uniform imperial pole, this

second pole presents the most diverse of forms. But as varied as relations of

personal dependence are, they always mark qualified and topical conjunc-

tions. It was the evolved empires, of the East and of the West, that first

developed this new public sphere of the private, through institutions such

as the consilium and the fiscus in the Roman Empire (it was through these

institutions that freed slaves acquired a political power paralleling that of

the functionaries).

But it was also the autonomous cities, the feudal sys-

tems. .. The question as to whether these last-mentioned formations still

answer to the concept of the State can be formulated only after certain cor-

relations have been taken into account. Every bit as much as the evolved

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empires, the autonomous cities, and feudal systems presuppose an archaic

empire that served as their foundation; they were themselves in contact

with evolved empires that reacted back upon them; they actively prepared

the way for new forms of the State (for example, absolute monarchy as the

culmination of a certain kind of subjective law and a feudal process).

effect, in the rich domain of personal relations, what counts is not the

capriciousness or variability of the individuals but the consistency of the

relations, and the adequation between a subjectivity that can reach the

point of delirium and qualified acts that are sources of rights and obliga-

tions. In a beautiful passage, Edgar Quinet underlines this coincidence

between "the delirium of the twelve Cesars and the golden age of Roman

law."

The subjectifications, conjunctions, and appropriations do not prevent

the decoded flows from continuing to flow, and from ceaselessly engender-

ing new flows that escape (we saw this, for example, at the level of a

micropolitics of the Middle Ages). This is where there is an ambiguity in

these apparatuses: they can only function with decoded flows, and yet they

do not let them stream together; they perform topical conjunctions that

stand as so many knots or recodings. This accounts for the historians'

impression that capitalism "could have" developed beginning at a certain

moment, in China, in Rome, in Byzantium, in the Middle Ages, that the

conditions for it existed but were not effectuated or even capable of being

effectuated. The situation is that the pressure of the flows draws capitalism

in negative outline, but for it to be realized there must be a whole integral of
decoded flows, a whole generalized conjunction that overspills and over-

turns the preceding apparatuses. And in fact when Marx sets about defin-

ing capitalism, he begins by invoking the advent of a single unqualified and

global Subjectivity, which capitalizes all of the processes of

subjectifica-tion, "all activities without distinction": "productive activity

in general," "the sole subjective essence of wealth . . ." And this single

Subject now expresses itself in an Object in general, no longer in this or

that qualitative state: "Along with the abstract universality of

wealth-creating activity we have now the universality of the object defined

as wealth, viz. the product in general, or labor in general, but as past,

materialized labor."

Circulation constitutes capital as a subjectivity

commensurate with society in its entirety. But this new social subjectivity

can form only to the extent that the decoded flows overspill their

conjunctions and attain a level of decoding that the State apparatuses are

no longer able to reclaim: on the one hand, the flow of labor must no

longer be determined as slavery or serfdom but must become naked and free

labor; and on the other hand, wealth must no longer be determined as

money dealing, merchant's or landed wealth, but must become pure

homogeneous and independent capital. And doubt-

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B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE □ 453

less, these two becomings at least (for other flows also converge) introduce

many contingencies and many different factors on each of the lines. But it

is their abstract conjunction in a single stroke that constitutes capitalism,

providing a universal subject and an object in general for one another. Cap-

italism forms when the flow of unqualified wealth encounters the flow of

unqualified labor and conjugates with it.

This is what the preceding con-

junctions, which were still topical or qualitative, had always inhibited (the

two principal inhibitors were the feudal organization of the countryside

and the corporative organization of the towns). This amounts to saying

that capitalism forms with a general axiomatic of decoded flows. "Capital is

a right, or, to be more precise, a relation of production that is manifested as

a right, and as such it is independent of the concrete form that it cloaks at

each moment of its productive function."

Private property no longer

expresses the bond of personal dependence but the independence of a Sub-

ject that now constitutes the sole bond. This makes for an important differ-

ence in the evolution of private property: private property in itself relates

to rights, instead of the law relating it to the land, things, or people (this

raises in particular the famous question of the elimination of ground rent

in capitalism). A new threshold of deterritorialization. And when capital

becomes an active right in this way, the entire historical figure of the law

changes. The law ceases to be the overcoding of customs, as it was in the

archaic empire; it is no longer a set of topics, as it was in the evolved States,

the autonomous cities, and the feudal systems; it increasingly assumes the

direct form and immediate characteristics of an axiomatic, as evidenced in

our civil "code."

When the flows reach this capitalist threshold of decoding and deterri-

torialization (naked labor, independent capital), it seems that there is no

longer a need for a State, for distinct juridical and political domination, in

order to ensure appropriation, which has become directly economic. The

economy constitutes a worldwide axiomatic, a "universal cosmopolitan

energy which overflows every restriction and bond,"

a mobile and con-

vertible substance "such as the total value of annual production." Today we

can depict an enormous, so-called stateless, monetary mass that circulates

through foreign exchange and across borders, eluding control by the States,

forming a multinational ecumenical organization, constituting a de facto

supranational power untouched by governmental decisions.

But what-

ever dimensions or quantities this may have assumed today, capitalism has

from the beginning mobilized a force of deterritorialization infinitely sur-

passing the deterritorialization proper to the State. For since Paleolithic

and Neolithic times, the State has been deterritorializing to the extent that

it makes the earth an object of its higher unity, a forced aggregate of coexis-

tence, instead of the free play of territories among themselves and with the

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lineages. But this is precisely the sense in which the State is termed "terri-

torial." Capitalism, on the other hand, is not at all territorial, even in its

beginnings: its power of deterritorialization consists in taking as its object,

not the earth, but "materialized labor," the commodity. And private prop-

erty is no longer ownership of the land or the soil, nor even of the means of

production as such, but of convertible abstract rights.

That is why capital-

ism marks a mutation in worldwide or ecumenical organizations, which

now take on a consistency of their own: the worldwide axiomatic, instead

of resulting from heterogeneous social formations and their relations, for

the most part distributes these formations, determines their relations,

while organizing an international division of labor. From all these stand-

points, it could be said that capitalism develops an economic order that

could do without the State. And in fact capitalism is not short on war cries

against the State, not only in the name of the market, but by virtue of its

superior deterritorialization.

This, however, is only one very partial aspect of capital. If it is true that

we are not using the word axiomatic as a simple metaphor, we must review

what distinguishes an axiomatic from all manner of codes, overcodings,

and recodings: the axiomatic deals directly with purely functional ele-

ments and relations whose nature is not specified, and which are immedi-

ately realized in highly varied domains simultaneously; codes, on the other

hand, are relative to those domains and express specific relations between

qualified elements that cannot be subsumed by a higher formal unity

(overcoding) except by transcendence and in an indirect fashion. The
immanent axiomatic finds in the domains it moves through so many mod-

els, termed models of realization. It could similarly be said that capital as

right, as a "qualitatively homogeneous and quantitatively commensurable

element," is realized in sectors and means of production (or that "unified

capital" is realized in "differentiated capital"). However, the different sec-

tors are not alone in serving as models of realization—the States do too.

Each of them groups together and combines several sectors, according to

its resources, population, wealth, industrial capacity, etc. Thus the States,

in capitalism, are not canceled out but change form and take on a new

meaning: models of realization for a worldwide axiomatic that exceeds

them. But to exceed is not at all the same thing as doing without. We have

already seen that capitalism proceeds by way of the State-form rather than

the town-form; the basis for the fundamental mechanisms described by

Marx (the colonial regime, the public debt, the modern tax system and

indirect taxation, industrial protectionism, trade wars) may be laid in the

towns, but the towns function as mechanisms of accumulation, accelera-

tion, and concentration only to the extent that they are appropriated by

States. Recent events tend to confirm this principle from another angle.

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For example, NASA appeared ready to mobilize considerable capital for
interplanetary exploration, as though capitalism were riding a vector tak-
ing it to the moon; but following the USSR, which conceived of extraterres-
trial space as a belt that should circle the earth taken as the "object," the
American government cut off funds for exploration and returned capital in
this case to a more centered model. It is thus proper to State
deterrito-rialization to moderate the superior deterritorialization of capital
and to provide the latter with compensatory reterritorializations. More
generally, this extreme example aside, we must take into account a
"materialist" determination of the modern State or nation-state: a group of
producers in which labor and capital circulate freely, in other words, in
which the homogeneity and competition of capital is effectuated, in
principle without external obstacles. In order to be effectuated, capitalism
has always required there to be a new force and a new law of States, on the
level of the flow of labor as on the level of the flow of independent
capital.

So States are not at all transcendent paradigms of an overcoding but

immanent models of realization for an axiomatic of decoded flows. Once
again, our use of the word "axiomatic" is far from a metaphor; we find liter-
ally the same theoretical problems that are posed by the models in an axio-
matic repeated in relation to the State. For models of realization, though
varied, are supposed to be isomorphic with regard to the axiomatic they
effectuate; however, this isomorphy, concrete variations considered,
accommodates itself to the greatest of formal differences. Moreover, a sin-
gle axiomatic seems capable of encompassing polymorphic models, not
only when it is not yet "saturated," but with those models as integral ele-
ments of its saturation.

These "problems" become singularly political

when we think of modern States.

1. Are not all modern States isomorphic in relation to the capitalist axi-

omatic, to the point that the difference between democratic, totalitarian,
liberal, and tyrannical States depends only on concrete variables, and on
the worldwide distribution of those variables, which always undergo even-
tual readjustments? Even the so-called socialist States are isomorphic, to
the extent that there is only one world market, the capitalist one.

2. Conversely, does not the world capitalist axiomatic tolerate a real

polymorphy, or even a heteromorphy, of models, and for two reasons? On
the one hand, capital as a general relation of production can very easily
integrate concrete sectors or modes of production that are noncapitalist.
But on the other hand, and this is the main point, the bureaucratic socialist
States can themselves develop different modes of production that only
conjugate with capitalism to form a set whose "power" exceeds that of the
axiomatic itself (it will be necessary to try to determine the nature of this

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power, why we so often think of it in apocalyptic terms, what conflicts it

spawns, what slim chances it leaves us.. .)•

3. A typology of modern States is thus coupled with a metaeconomics:

it would be inaccurate to treat all States as "interchangeable" (even

isomorphy does not have that consequence), but it would be no less inac-

curate to privilege a certain form of the State (forgetting that polymorphy

establishes strict complementarities between the Western democracies

and the colonial or neocolonial tyrannies that they install or support in

other regions) or to equate the bureaucratic socialist States with the totali-

tarian capitalist States (neglecting the fact that the axiomatic can encom-

pass a real heteromorphy from which the higher power of the aggregate

derives, even if it is for the worse).

What is called a nation-state, in the most diverse forms, is precisely the

State as a model of realization. And the birth of nations implies many arti-

fices: Not only are they constituted in an active struggle against the imper-

ial or evolved systems, the feudal systems, and the autonomous cities, but

they crush their own "minorities," in other words, minoritarian phenom-

ena that could be termed "nationalitarian," which work from within and if

need be turn to the old codes to find a greater degree of freedom. The con-

stituents of the nation are a land and a people: the "natal," which is not nec-

essarily innate, and the "popular," which is not necessarily pregiven. The

problem of the nation is aggravated in the two extreme cases of a land with-

out a people and a people without a land. How can a people and a land be

made, in other words, a nation—a refrain? The coldest and bloodiest

means vie with upsurges of romanticism. The axiomatic is complex, and is

not without passions. The natal or the land, as we have seen elsewhere,

implies a certain deterritorialization of the territories (community land,

imperial provinces, seigneurial domains, etc.), and the people, a decoding

of the population. The nation is constituted on the basis of these flows and

is inseparable from the modern State that gives consistency to the corre-

sponding land and people. It is the flow of naked labor that makes the peo-

ple, just as it is the flow of Capital that makes the land and its industrial

base. In short, the nation is the very operation of a collective

subjecti-fication, to which the modern State corresponds as a process of

subjection. It is in the form of the nation-state, with all its possible

variations, that the State becomes the model of realization for the capitalist

axiomatic. This is not at all to say that nations are appearances or

ideological phenomena; on the contrary, they are the passional and living

forms in which the qualitative homogeneity and the quantitative

competition of abstract capital are first realized.

We distinguish machinic enslavement and social subjection as two sepa-

rate concepts. There is enslavement when human beings themselves are

7000 B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE □ 457

constituent pieces of a machine that they compose among themselves and

with other things (animals, tools), under the control and direction of a

higher unity. But there is subjection when the higher unity constitutes the

human being as a subject linked to a now exterior object, which can be an

animal, a tool, or even a machine. The human being is no longer a compo-

nent of the machine but a worker, a user. He or she is subjected to the

machine and no longer enslaved by the machine. This is not to say that the

second regime is more human. But the first regime does seem to have a spe-

cial relation to the archaic imperial formation: human beings are not sub-

jects but pieces of a machine that overcodes the aggregate (this has been

called "generalized slavery," as opposed to the private slavery of antiquity,

or feudal serfdom). We believe that Lewis Mumford is right in designating

the archaic empires megamachines, and in pointing out that, once again, it

is not a question of a metaphor: "If a machine can be defined more or less in

accord with the classic definition of Reuleaux, as a combination of resist-

ant parts, each specialized in function, operating under human control to

transmit motion and to perform work, then the human machine was a real

machine."

Of course, it was the modern State and capitalism that brought

the triumph of machines, in particular of motorized machines (whereas

the archaic State had simple machines at best); but what we are referring to

now are technical machines, which are definable extrinsically. One is not

enslaved by the technical machine but rather subjected to it. It would

appear, then, that the modern State, through technological development,

has substituted an increasingly powerful social subjection for machinic

enslavement. Ancient slavery and feudal serfdom were already procedures

of subjection. But the naked or "free" worker of capitalism takes subjection

to its most radical expression, since the processes of subjectification no

longer even enter into partial conjunctions that interrupt the flow. In

effect, capital acts as the point of subjectification that constitutes all

human beings as subjects; but some, the "capitalists," are subjects of enun-

ciation that form the private subjectivity of capital, while the others, the

"proletarians," are subjects of the statement, subjected to the technical

machines in which constant capital is effectuated. The wage regime can

therefore take the subjection of human beings to an unprecedented point,

and exhibit a singular cruelty, yet still be justified in its humanist cry: No,

human beings are not machines, we don't treat them like machines, we cer-

tainly don't confuse variable capital and constant capital.. .

Capitalism arises as a worldwide enterprise of subjectification by con-

stituting an axiomatic of decoded flows. Social subjection, as the correlate

of subjectification, appears much more in the axiomatic's models of real-

ization than in the axiomatic itself. It is within the framework of the

nation-State, or of national subjectivities, that processes of subjectifica-

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tion and the corresponding subjections are manifested. The axiomatic

itself, of which the States are models of realization, restores or reinvents, in

new and now technical forms, an entire system of machinic enslavement.

This in no way represents a return to the imperial machine since we are now

in the immanence of an axiomatic, and not under the transcendence of a

formal Unity. But it is the reinvention of a machine of which human beings

are constituent parts, instead of subjected workers or users. If motorized

machines constituted the second age of the technical machine, cybernetic

and informational machines form a third age that reconstructs a gener-

alized regime of subjection: recurrent and reversible "humans-machines

systems" replace the old nonrecurrent and nonreversible relations of sub-

jection between the two elements; the relation between human and

machine is based on internal, mutual communication, and no longer on

usage or action.

In the organic composition of capital, variable capital

defines a regime of subjection of the worker (human surplus value), the

principal framework of which is the business or factory. But with automa-

tion comes a progressive increase in the proportion of constant capital; we

then see a new kind of enslavement: at the same time the work regime

changes, surplus value becomes machinic, and the framework expands to

all of society. It could also be said that a small amount of subjectification

took us away from machinic enslavement, but a large amount brings us

back to it. Attention has recently been focused on the fact that modern

power is not at all reducible to the classical alternative "repression or ideol-

ogy" but implies processes of normalization, modulation, modeling, and

information that bear on language, perception, desire, movement, etc.,

and which proceed by way of microassemblages. This aggregate includes

both subjection and enslavement taken to extremes, as two simultaneous

parts that constantly reinforce and nourish each other. For example, one is

subjected to TV insofar as one uses and consumes it, in the very particular

situation of a subject of the statement that more or less mistakes itself for a

subject of enunciation ("you, dear television viewers, who make TV what it

is . . ."); the technical machine is the medium between two subjects. But

one is enslaved by TV as a human machine insofar as the television viewers

are no longer consumers or users, nor even subjects who supposedly

"make" it, but intrinsic component pieces, "input" and "output," feedback

or recurrences that are no longer connected to the machine in such a way as

to produce or use it. In machinic enslavement, there is nothing but trans-

formations and exchanges of information, some of which are mechanical,

others human.

The term "subjection," of course, should not be confined

to the national aspect, with enslavement seen as international or world-

wide. For information technology is also the property of the States that set

themselves up as humans-machines systems. But this is so precisely to the

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extent that the two aspects, the axiomatic and the models of realization,

constantly cross over into each other and are themselves in communica-

tion. Social subjection proportions itself to the model of realization, just as

machinic enslavement expands to meet the dimensions of the axiomatic

that is effectuated in the model. We have the privilege of undergoing the

two operations simultaneously, in relation to the same things and the same

events. Rather than stages, subjection and enslavement constitute two

coexistent poles.

We may return to the different forms of the State, from the standpoint of

a universal history. We distinguish three major forms: (1) imperial archaic

States, which are paradigms and constitute a machine of enslavement by

overcoding already-coded flows (these States have little diversity, due to a

certain formal immutability that applies to all of them); (2) extremely

diverse States—evolved empires, autonomous cities, feudal systems,

monarchies—which proceed instead by subjectification and subjection,

and constitute qualified or topical conjunctions of decoded flows; 3) the

modern nation-States, which take decoding even further and are models of

realization for an axiomatic or a general conjugation of flows (these States

combine social subjection and the new machinic enslavement, and their

very diversity is a function of isomorphy, of the eventual heteromorphy or

polymorphy of the models in relation to the axiomatic).

There are, of course, all kinds of external circumstances that mark pro-

found breaks between these types of States, and above all submit the

archaic empires to utter oblivion, a shrouding lifted only by archaeology.

The empires disappeared suddenly, as though in an instantaneous catas-

trophe. As in the Dorian invasion, a war machine looms up and bears down

from without, killing memory. Yet things proceed quite differently on the

inside, where all the States resonate together, appropriate armies for them-

selves, and exhibit a unity of composition in spite of their differences in

organization and development. It is evident that all decoded flows, of

whatever kind, are prone to forming a war machine directed against the

State. But everything changes depending on whether these flows connect

up with a war machine or, on the contrary, enter into conjunctions or a gen-

eral conjugation that appropriates them for the State. From this stand-

point, the modern States have a kind of transspatiotemporal unity with the

archaic State. The internal correlation between 1 and 2 appears most

clearly in the fact that the fragmented forms of the Aegean world presup-

pose the great imperial form of the Orient and find in it a stock or agricul-

tural surplus, which they consequently have no need to produce or

accumulate for themselves. And to the extent that the States of the second

age are nevertheless obliged to reconstitute a stock, if only because of exter-

nal circumstances—what State can do without one?—in so doing they

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always reactivate an evolved imperial form. We find the revival of this

form in the Greek, Roman, and feudal worlds: there is always an empire on

the horizon, which for the subjective States plays the role of signifier and

encompassing element. And the correlation between 2 and 3 is no less pro-

nounced, for industrial revolutions are not wanting, and the difference

between topical conjunctions and the great conjugation of decoded flows is

so thin that one is left with the impression that capitalism was continually

being born, disappearing and reviving at every crossroads of history. And

the correlation between 3 and 1 is also a necessary one: the modern States

of the third age do indeed restore the most absolute of empires, a new

"megamachine," whatever the novelty or timeliness of its now immanent

form; they do this by realizing an axiomatic that functions as much by

machinic enslavement as by social subjection. Capitalism has reawakened

the Urstaat, and given it new strength.

Not only, as Hegel said, does every State imply "the essential moments

of its existence as a State," but there is a unique moment, in the sense of a

coupling of forces, and this moment of the State is capture, bond, knot,
nexum, magical capture. Must we speak of a second pole, which would

operate instead by pact and contract? Is this not instead that other force,

with capture as the unique moment of coupling? For the two forces are the

overcoding of coded flows, and the treatment of decoded flows. The con-

tract is a juridical expression of the second aspect: it appears as the pro-

ceeding of subjectification, the outcome of which is subjection. And the

contract must be pushed to the extreme; in other words, it is no longer con-

cluded between two people but between self and self, within the same

person—Ich = Ich—as subjected and sovereign. The extreme perversion

of the contract, reinstating the purest of knots. The knot, bond, capture,

thus travel a long history: first, the objective, imperial collective bond; then

all of the forms of subjective personal bonds; finally, the Subject that binds

itself, and in so doing renews the most magical operation, "a cosmopolitan,

universal energy which overflows every restriction and bond so as to estab-

lish itself instead as the sole bond."

Even subjection is only a relay for the

fundamental moment of the State, namely, civil capture or machinic

enslavement. The State is assuredly not the locus of liberty, nor the agent of

a forced servitude or war capture. Should we then speak of "voluntary ser-

vitude"? This is like the expression "magical capture": its only merit is to

underline the apparent mystery. There is a machinic enslavement, about

which it could be said in each case that it presupposes itself, that it appears

as preaccomplished; this machinic enslavement is no more "voluntary"

than it is "forced."

ROPOSITION

XIV. Axiomatics and the presentday situation.

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B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE □ 461

Politics is by no means an apodictic science. It proceeds by experimen-

tation, groping in the dark, injection, withdrawal, advances, retreats. The

factors of decision and prediction are limited. It is an absurdity to postu-

late a world supergovernment that makes the final decisions. No one is

even capable of predicting the growth in the money supply. Similarly, the

States are affected by all kinds of coefficients of uncertainty and unpredict-

ability. John Kenneth Galbraith and Francois Chatelet have formulated

the concept of constant and decisive errors, which make the glory of men of

State no less than their rare successful evaluations. But that is just one

more reason to make a connection between politics and axiomatics. For in

science an axiomatic is not at all a transcendent, autonomous, and

decision-making power opposed to experimentation and intuition. On the

one hand, it has its own gropings in the dark, experimentations, modes of

intuition. Axioms being independent of each other, can they be added, and

up to what point (a saturated system)? Can they be withdrawn (a "weak-

ened" system)? On the other hand, it is of the nature of axiomatics to come

up against so-called undecidable propositions, to confront necessarily
higher powers that it cannot master.

Finally, axiomatics does not consti-

tute the cutting edge of science; it is much more a stopping point, a reorder-

ing that prevents decoded semiotic flows in physics and mathematics from

escaping in all directions. The great axiomaticians are the men of State of

science, who seal off the lines of flight that are so frequent in mathematics,

who would impose a new nexum, if only a temporary one, and who lay

down the official policies of science. They are the heirs of the theorematic

conception of geometry. When intuitionism opposed axiomatics, it was

not only in the name of intuition, of construction and creation, but also in

the name of a calculus of problems, a problematic conception of science

that was not less abstract but implied an entirely different abstract

machine, one working in the undecidable and the fugitive.

It is the real

characteristics of axiomatics that lead us to say that capitalism and pres-

ent-day politics are an axiomatic in the literal sense. But it is precisely for

this reason that nothing is played out in advance. From this standpoint, we

may present a summary sketch of the "givens."

1. Addition, subtraction. The axioms of capitalism are obviously not

theoretical propositions, or ideological formulas, but operative statements

that constitute the semiological form of Capital and that enter as compo-

nent parts into assemblages of production, circulation, and consumption.

The axioms are primary statements, which do not derive from or depend

upon another statement. In this sense, a flow can be the object of one or

several axioms (with the set of all axioms constituting the conjugation of

the flows); but it can also lack any axioms of its own, its treatment being

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only a consequence of other axioms; finally, it can remain out of bounds,

evolve without limits, be left in the state of an "untamed" variation in the

system. There is a tendency within capitalism continually to add more axi-

oms. After the end of World War I, the joint influence of the world depres-

sion and the Russian Revolution forced capitalism to multiply its axioms,

to invent new ones dealing with the working class, employment, union

organization, social institutions, the role of the State, the foreign and

domestic markets. Keynesian economics and the New Deal were axiom

laboratories. Examples of the creation of new axioms after the Second

World War: the Marshall Plan, forms of assistance and lending, transfor-

mations in the monetary system. It is not only in periods of expansion or

recovery that axioms multiply. What makes the axiomatic vary, in relation

to the States, is the distinction and relation between the foreign and domes-

tic markets. There is a multiplication of axioms most notably when an inte-

grated domestic market is being organized to meet the requirements of the

foreign market. Axioms for the young, for the old, for women, etc. A very

general pole of the State, "social democracy," can be defined by this ten-

dency to add, invent axioms in relation to spheres of investment and

sources of profit: the question is not that of freedom and constraint, nor of

centralism and decentralization, but of the manner in which one masters

the flows. In this case, they are mastered by the multiplication of directing

axioms. The opposite tendency is no less a part of capitalism: the tendency

to withdraw, subtract axioms. One falls back on a very small number of axi-

oms regulating the dominant flows, while the other flows are given a deriv-

ative, consequential status (defined by the "theorems" ensuing from the

axioms), or are left in an untamed state that does not preclude the brutal

intervention of State power, quite the contrary. The "totalitarianism" pole

of the State incarnates this tendency to restrict the number of axioms, and

operates by the exclusive promotion of the foreign sector: the appeal to for-

eign sources of capital, the rise of industries aimed at the exportation of

foodstuffs or raw materials, the collapse of the domestic market. The totali-

tarian State iS not a maximum State but rather, following Virilio's formula-

tion, the minimum State of anarcho-capitalism (cf. Chile). At the limit, the

only axioms that are retained concern the equilibrium of the foreign sector,

reserve levels and the inflation rate; "the population is no longer a given, it

has become a consequence." As for untamed evolutions, they appear

among other places in the variations in the employment level, in the phe-

nomena of exodus from the countryside, shantytown-urbanization, etc.

The case of fascism ("national socialism") is distinct from totalitarian-

ism. It coincides with the totalitarian pole in the collapse of the domestic

market and the reduction in the number of axioms. However, the promo-

tion of the foreign sector does not at all take place through an appeal to for-

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eign sources of capital and through export industries, but through a war

economy, which entails an expansionism foreign to totalitarianism and an

autonomous fabrication of capital. As for the domestic market, it is effec-

tuated in a specific production of the Ersatz. This means that fascism, too,

brings a proliferation of axioms, which explains why it has often been com-

pared to a Keynesian economy. Fascism, however, is a tautological or ficti-

tious proliferation, a multiplication by subtraction; this makes it a very

special case.

2. Saturation. Can we express the distribution of the two opposite ten-

dencies by saying that the saturation of the system marks the point of inver-

sion? No, for the saturation is itself relative. If Marx demonstrated the

functioning of capitalism as an axiomatic, it was above all in the famous

chapter on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Capitalism is indeed an

axiomatic, because it has no laws but immanent ones. It would like for us to

believe that it confronts the limits of the Universe, the extreme limit of

resources and energy. But all it confronts are its own limits (the periodic

depreciation of existing capital); all it repels or displaces are its own limits

(the formation of new capital, in new industries with a high profit rate).

This is the history of oil and nuclear power. And it does both at once: capi-

talism confronts its own limits and simultaneously displaces them, setting

them down again farther along. It could be said that the totalitarian ten-

dency to restrict the number of axioms corresponds to the confrontation

with the limits, whereas the social democratic tendency corresponds to the

displacement of the limits. But one does not come without the other, either

in two different but coexistent places or in two successive but closely linked

moments; they always have a hold on each other, or are even contained in

each other, constituting the same axiomatic. A typical example would be

present-day Brazil, with its ambiguous alternative "totalitarianism-social

democracy." As a general rule, the limits are all the more mobile if axioms

are subtracted in one place but added elsewhere.

It would be an error to take a disinterested stance toward struggle on the

level of the axioms. It is sometimes thought that every axiom, in capitalism

or in one of its States, constitutes a "recuperation." But this disenchanted

concept is not a good one. The constant readjustments of the capitalist axi-

omatic, in other words, the additions (the enunciation of new axioms) and

the withdrawals (the creation of exclusive axioms), are the object of strug-

gles in no way confined to the technocracy. Everywhere, the workers' strug-

gles overspill the framework of the capitalist enterprises, which imply for

the most part derivative propositions. The struggles bear directly upon the

axioms that presi de over the State's public spending, or that even concern a

specific international organization (for example, a multinational corpora-

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tion can at will plan the liquidation of a factory inside a country). The

resulting danger of a worldwide labor bureaucracy or technocracy taking

charge of these problems can be warded off only to the extent that local

struggles directly target national and international axioms, at the precise

point of their insertion in the field of immanence (the potential of the rural

world in this respect). There is always a fundamental difference between

living flows and the axioms that subordinate them to centers of control and

decision making, that make a given segment correspond to them, which

measure their quanta. But the pressure of the living flows, and of the prob-

lems they pose and impose, must be exerted inside the axiomatic, as much

in order to fight the totalitarian reductions as to anticipate and precipitate

the additions, to orient them and prevent their technocratic perversion.

3. Models, isomorphy. In principle, all States are isomorphic; in other

words, they are domains of realization of capital as a function of a sole

external world market. But the first question is whether isomorphy implies

a homogeneity or even a homogenization of States. The answer is yes, as

can be seen in present-day Europe with respect to justice and the police, the

highway code, the circulation of commodities, production costs, etc. But

this is true only insofar as there is a tendency toward a single integrated

domestic market. Otherwise, isomorphy in no way implies homogeneity:

there is isomorphy, but heterogeneity, between totalitarian and social dem-

ocratic States wherever the mode of production is the same. The general

rules regarding this are as follows: the consistency, the totality {Vensemble),
or unity of the axiomatic are defined by capital as a "right" or relation of

production (for the market); the respective independence of the axioms in

no way contradicts this totality but derives from the divisions or sectors of

the capitalist mode of production; the isomorphy of the models, with the

two poles of addition and subtraction, depends on how the domestic and

foreign markets are distributed in each case.

But this is only a first bipolarity, applying to the States that are located

at the center and are under the capitalist mode of production. A second,

West-East, bipolarity has been imposed on the States of the center, that of

the capitalist States and the bureaucratic socialist States. Although this

new distinction may share certain traits of the first (the so-called socialist

States being assimilable to the totalitarian States), the problem lies else-

where. The numerous "convergence" theories that attempt to demonstrate

a certain homogenization of the States of the East and West are not very

convincing. Even isomorphism is not applicable: there is a real

heteromorphy, not only because the mode of production is not capitalist,

but also because the relation of production is not Capital (rather, it is the

Plan). If the socialist States are nevertheless still models of realization for

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the capitalist axiomatic, it is due to the existence of a single external

world market, which remains the deciding factor here, even above and

beyond the relations of production from which it results. It can even hap-

pen that the socialist bureaucraticplan(e) takes on a parasitic function in

relation to the plan(e) of capital, which manifests a greater creativity, of

the "virus" type.

Finally, the third fundamental bipolarity is the center and the periphery

(North-South). In view of the respective independence of the axioms, we

can join Samir Amin in saying that the axioms of the periphery differ from

those of the center.

And here again, the difference and independence of

the axioms in no way compromise the consistency of the overall axiomatic.

On the contrary, central capitalism needs the periphery constituted by the

Third World, where it locates a large part of its most modern industries; it

does not just invest capital in these industries, but is also furnished with

capital by them. The issue of the dependence of the Third World States is of

course an obvious one, but not the most important one (it was bequeathed

by the old colonialism). It is obvious that having independent axioms has

never guaranteed the independence of States; rather it ensures an interna-

tional division of labor. The important question, once again, is that of

isomorphy in relation to the worldwide axiomatic. To a large extent, there

is isomorphy between the United States and the bloodiest of the South

American tyrannies (or between France, England, and West Germany and

certain African States). The center-periphery bipolarity, States of the cen-

ter and States of the Third World, may well exhibit some of the distinguish-

ing traits of the two preceding bipolarities, but it also evades them, raising

other problems. Throughout a vast portion of the Third World, the general

relation of production is capital—even throughout the entire Third World,

in the sense that the socialized sector may utilize that relation, adopting it

in this case. But the mode of production is not necessarily capitalist, either

in the so-called archaic or transitional forms, or in the most productive,

highly industrialized sectors. This indeed represents a third case, included

in the worldwide axiomatic: when capital acts as the relation of production

but in noncapitalist modes of production. We may therefore speak of a

polymorphy of the Third World States in relation to the States of the center.

And this dimension of the axiomatic is no less necessary than the others; it

is even much more necessary, for the heteromorphy of the so-called social-

ist States was imposed upon capitalism, which digested it as best it could,

whereas the polymorphy of the Third World States is partially organized

by the center, as an axiom providing a substitute for colonization.

We are always brought back to the literal question of the models of real-

ization of a worldwide axiomatic: there is in principle an isomorphy of the

States of the center, a heteromorphy imposed by the bureaucratic socialist

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State, and a polymorphy organized by the Third World States. Once again,

it would be absurd to think that the insertion of popular movements is con-

demned in advance throughout this field of immanence, and to assume

that there are either "good" States that are democratic, social democratic

or at the other extreme socialist, or that on the contrary all States are equiv-

alent and homogeneous.

4. Power (puissance). Let us suppose that the axiomatic necessarily mar-

shals a power higher than the one it treats, in other words, than that of the

aggregates serving as its models. This is like a power of the continuum, tied

to the axiomatic but exceeding it. We immediately recognize this power as

a power of destruction, of war, a power incarnated in financial, industrial,

and military technological complexes that are in continuity with one

another. On the one hand, war clearly follows the same movement as capi-

talism: In the same way as the proportion of constant capital keeps grow-

ing, war becomes increasingly a "war of materiel" in which the human

being no longer even represents a variable capital of subjection, but is

instead a pure element of machinic enslavement. On the other hand, and

this is the main point, the growing importance of constant capital in the

axiomatic means that the depreciation of existing capital and the forma-

tion of new capital assume a rhythm and scale that necessarily take the

route of a war machine now incarnated in the complexes: the complexes

actively contribute to the redistributions of the world necessary for the

exploitation of maritime and planetary resources. There is a continuous

"threshold" of power that accompanies in every instance the shifting of the

axiomatic's limits; it is as though the power of war always supersaturated

the system's saturation, and was its necessary condition.

The classical conflicts among the States of the center (as well as periph-

eral colonization) have been joined, or rather replaced, by two great

conflictual lines, between West and East and North and South; these lines

intersect and together cover everything. But the overarmament of the West

and East not only leaves the reality of local wars entirely intact and gives

them a new force and new stakes; it not only founds the "apocalyptic" pos-

sibility of a direct confrontation along the two great axes; it also seems that

the war machine takes on a specific supplementary meaning: industrial,

political, judicial, etc. It is indeed true that the States, throughout their his-

tory, have repeatedly appropriated the war machine; and it was after the

war machine was appropriated that war, its preparation and effectuation,

became the exclusive object of the machine, but as a more or less "limited"

war. As for the aim, it remained the political aim of the States. The various

factors that tended to make war a "total war," most notably the fascist fac-

tor, marked the beginning of an inversion of the movement: as though the

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States, through the war they waged against one another, had after a long
period of appropriation reconstituted an autonomous war machine. But
this unchained or liberated war machine continued to have as its object war
in action, a now total, unlimited kind of war. The entire fascist economy
became a war economy, but the war economy still needed total war as its
object. For this reason, fascist war still fell under Clausewitz's formula,
"the continuation of politics by other means," even though those other
means had become exclusive, in other words, the political aim had entered
into contradiction with the object (hence Virilio's idea that the fascist State
was a "suicidal" State more than a totalitarian one). It was only after World
War II that the automatization, then automation of the war machine had
their true effect. The war machine, the new antagonisms traversing it con-
sidered, no longer had war as its exclusive object but took in charge and as
its object peace, politics, the world order, in short, the aim. This is where
the inversion of Clausewitz's formula comes in: it is politics that becomes
the continuation of war; // is peace that technologically frees the unlimited
material process of total war. War ceases to be the materialization of the war
machine; the war machine itself becomes materialized war. In this sense,
there was no longer a need for fascism. The Fascists were only child precur-
sors, and the absolute peace of survival succeeded where total war had
failed. The Third World War was already upon us. The war machine
reigned over the entire axiomatic like the power of the continuum that sur-
rounded the "world-economy," and it put all the parts of the universe in
contact. The world became a smooth space again (sea, air, atmosphere),
over which reigned a single war machine, even when it opposed its own
parts. Wars had become a part of peace. More than that, the States no
longer appropriated the war machine; they reconstituted a war machine of
which they themselves were only the parts.

Of all the authors who have developed an apocalyptic or millenarian

sense, it is to Paul Virilio's credit to have emphasized these five rigorous
points: that the war machine finds its new object in the absolute peace of
terror or deterrence; that it performs a technoscientific "capitalization";
that this war machine is terrifying not as a function of a possible war that
it promises us, as by blackmail, but, on the contrary, as a function of the
real, very special kind of peace it promotes and has already installed; that
this war machine no longer needs a qualified enemy but, in conformity
with the requirements of an axiomatic, operates against the "unspecified
enemy," domestic or foreign (an individual, group, class, people, event,
world); that there arose from this a new conception of security as materia-
lized war, as organized insecurity or molecularized, distributed, pro-
grammed catastrophe.

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5. The included middle. No one has demonstrated more convincingly

than Braudel that the capitalist axiomatic requires a center and that this

center was constituted in the North, at the outcome of a long historical

process: "There can only be a world-economy when the mesh of the net-

work is sufficiently fine, and when exchange is regular and voluminous

enough to give rise to a central zone."

Many authors believe on this

account that the North-South, center-periphery axis is more important

today than the West-East axis, and even principally determines it. This is

expressed in a common thesis, taken up and developed by Valery Giscard

d'Estaing: the more equilibrated things become at the center between the

West and the East, beginning with the equilibrium of overarmament, the

more they become disequilibrated or "destabilized" from North to South

and destabilize the central equilibrium. It is clear that in these formulas the

South is an abstract term designating the Third World or the periphery;

and even that there are Souths or Third Worlds inside the center. It is also

clear that this destabilization is not accidental but is a (theorematic) conse-

quence of the axioms of capitalism, principally of the axiom called unequal
exchange, which is indispensable to capitalism's functioning. This for-

mula is therefore the modern version of the oldest formula, which already

obtained in the archaic empires under different conditions. The more the

archaic empire overcoded the flows, the more it stimulated decoded flows

that turned back against it and forced it to change. The more the decoded

flows enter into a central axiomatic, the more they tend to escape to the

periphery, to present problems that the axiomatic is incapable of resolving

or controlling (even by adding special axioms for the periphery).

The four principal flows that torment the representatives of the world

economy, or of the axiomatic, are the flow of matter-energy, the flow of

population, the flow of food, and the urban flow. The situation seems inex-

tricable because the axiomatic never ceases to create all of these problems,

while at the same time its axioms, even multiplied, deny it the means of

resolving them (for example, the circulation and distribution that would

make it possible to feed the world). Even a social democracy adapted to the

Third World surely does not undertake to integrate the whole

poverty-stricken population into the domestic market; what it does,

rather, is to effect the class rupture that will select the integratable

elements. And the States of the center deal not only with the Third

World, each of them has not only an external Third World, but there are

internal Third Worlds that rise up within them and work them from the

inside. It could even be said in certain respects that the periphery and the

center exchange determinations: a deterritorialization of the center, a

decoding of the center in relation to national and territorial aggregates,

cause the peripheral formations to become true centers of investment,

while the central formations

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peripheralize. This simultaneously strengthens and relativizes Samir

Amin's theses. The more the worldwide axiomatic installs high industry

and highly industrialized agriculture at the periphery, provisionally

reserving for the center so-called postindustrial activities (automation,

electronics, information technologies, the conquest of space,

overarma-ment, etc.), the more it installs peripheral zones of

underdevelopment inside the center, internal Third Worlds, internal

Souths. "Masses" of the population are abandoned to erratic work

(subcontracting, temporary work, or work in the underground economy),

and their official subsistence is assured only by State allocations and

wages subject to interruption. It is to the credit of thinkers like Antonio

Negri to have formulated, on the basis of the exemplary case of Italy, the

theory of this internal margin, which tends increasingly to merge the

students with the emarginati.

These phenomena confirm the difference

between the new machinic enslavement and classical subjection. For

subjection remained centered on labor and involved a bipolar

organization, property-labor, bourgeoisie-proletariat. In enslavement and

the central dominance of constant capital, on the other hand, labor seems

to have splintered in two directions: intensive surplus labor that no longer

even takes the route of labor, and extensive labor that has become erratic

and floating. The totalitarian tendency to abandon axioms of employment

and the social democratic tendency to multiply statutes can combine

here, but always in order to effect class ruptures. The opposition between

the axiomatic and the flows it does not succeed in mastering becomes all

the more accentuated.

6. Minorities. Ours is becoming the age of minorities. We have seen sev-

eral times that minorities are not necessarily defined by the smallness of

their numbers but rather by becoming or a line of fluctuation, in other

words, by the gap that separates them from this or that axiom constituting a

redundant majority ("Ulysses, or today's average, urban European"; or as

Yann Moulier says, "the national Worker, qualified, male and over

thirty-five"). A minority can be small in number; but it can also be the

largest in number, constitute an absolute, indefinite majority. That is the

situation when authors, even those supposedly on the Left, repeat the great

capitalist warning cry: in twenty years, "whites" will form only 12

percent of the world population. . . Thus they are not content to say that the

majority will change, or has already changed, but say that it is impinged

upon by a nondenumerable and proliferating minority that threatens to

destroy the very concept of majority, in other words, the majority as an

axiom. And the curious concept of nonwhite does not in fact constitute a

denumerable set. What defines a minority, then, is not the number but the

relations internal to the number. A minority can be numerous, or even

infinite; so can a

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majority. What distinguishes them is that in the case of a majority the rela-

tion internal to the number constitutes a set that may be finite or infinite,

but is always denumerable, whereas the minority is defined as a non-

denumerable set, however many elements it may have. What characterizes

the nondenumerable is neither the set nor its elements; rather, it is the con-
nection, the "and" produced between elements, between sets, and which

belongs to neither, which eludes them and constitutes a line of flight. The

axiomatic manipulates only denumerable sets, even infinite ones, whereas

the minorities constitute "fuzzy," nondenumerable, nonaxiomizable sets,

in short, "masses," multiplicities of escape and flux.

Whether it be the infinite set of the nonwhites of the periphery, or the

restricted set of the Basques, Corsicans, etc., everywhere we look we see the

conditions for a worldwide movement: the minorities recreate

"nationali-tarian" phenomena that the nation-states had been charged with

controlling and quashing. The bureaucratic socialist sector is certainly not

spared by these movements, and as Amalrik said, the dissidents are

nothing, or serve only as pawns in international politics, if they are

abstracted from the minorities working the USSR. It matters little that the

minorities are incapable of constituting viable States from the point of

view of the axiomatic and the market, since in the long run they promote

compositions that do not pass by way of the capitalist economy any more

than they do the State-form. The response of the States, or of the axiomatic,

may obviously be to accord the minorities regional or federal or statutory

autonomy, in short, to add axioms. But this is not the problem: this

operation consists only in translating the minorities into denumerable sets

or subsets, which would enter as elements into the majority, which could

be counted among the majority. The same applies for a status accorded to

women, young people, erratic workers, etc. One could even imagine, in

blood and crisis, a more radical reversal that would make the white world

the periphery of a yellow world; there would doubtless be an entirely

different axiomatic. But what we are talking about is something else,

something even that would not resolve: women, nonmen, as a minority, as

a nondenumerable flow or set, would receive no adequate expression by

becoming elements of the majority, in other words, by becoming a

denumerable finite set. Nonwhites would receive no adequate expression

by becoming a new yellow or black majority, an infinite denumerable set.

What is proper to the minority is to assert a power of the nondenumerable,

even if that minority is composed of a single member. That is the formula

for multiplicities. Minority as a universal figure, or

becoming-everybody/everything (devenir tout le monde). Woman: we all

have to become that, whether we are male or female. Non-white: we all

have to become that, whether we are white, yellow, or black.

Once again, this is not to say that the struggle on the level of the axioms is

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B.C.: APPARATUS OF CAPTURE □ 471

without importance; on the contrary, it is determining (at the most diverse

levels: women's struggle for the vote, for abortion, for jobs; the struggle of

the regions for autonomy; the struggle of the Third World; the struggle of

the oppressed masses and minorities in the East or West...). But there is

also always a sign to indicate that these struggles are the index of another,

coexistent combat. However modest the demand, it always constitutes a

point that the axiomatic cannot tolerate: when people demand to formu-

late their problems themselves, and to determine at least the particular

conditions under which they can receive a more general solution (hold to

the Particular as an innovative form). It is always astounding to see the

same story repeated: the modesty of the minorities' initial demands, cou-

pled with the impotence of the axiomatic to resolve the slightest corre-

sponding problem. In short, the struggle around axioms is most important

when it manifests, itself opens, the gap between two types of propositions,

propositions of flow and propositions of axioms. The power of the minori-

ties is not measured by their capacity to enter and make themselves felt

within the majority system, nor even to reverse the necessarily tautolog-

ical criterion of the majority, but to bring to bear the force of the

non-denumerable sets, however small they may be, against the

denumerable sets, even if they are infinite, reversed, or changed, even they

if imply new axioms or, beyond that, a new axiomatic. The issue is not at all

anarchy versus organization, nor even centralism versus decentralization,

but a calculus or conception of the problems of nondenumerable sets,

against the axiomatic of denumerable sets. Such a calculus may have its

own compositions, organizations, even centralizations; nevertheless, it

proceeds not via the States or the axiomatic process but via a pure

becoming of minorities.

7. Undecidablepropositions. It will be objected that the axiomatic itself

marshals the power of a nondenumerable infinite set: precisely that of the

war machine. It seems difficult, however, to use the war machine in the gen-

eral "treatment" of minorities without triggering the absolute war it is sup-

posed to ward off. We have seen the war machine institute quantitative and

qualitative processes, miniaturizations, and adaptations that enable it to

graduate its attacks or counterattacks, each time as a function of the nature

of the "unspecified enemy" (individuals, groups, peoples.. .). But under

these conditions, the capitalist axiomatic continually produces and repro-

duces what the war machine tries to exterminate. Even the organization of

famine multiplies the starving as much as it kills them. Even the organiza-

tion of camps, an area where the socialist sector has dreadfully distin-

guished itself, does not assure the radical solution of which power dreams.

The extermination of a minority engenders a minority of that minority.

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However relentless the killing, it is relatively difficult to liquidate a people

or a group, even in the Third World, once it has enough connections with

elements of the axiomatic. In still other respects, it can be predicted that

the impending problems of the economy, which will consist in reforming

capital in relation to new resources (undersea oil, metallic nodules, food-

stuffs), will require not only a redistribution of the world that will mobilize

the worldwide war machine and train its parts on the new objectives; we

will also probably see the formation or re-formation of minoritarian aggre-

gates, in relation to the affected regions.

Generally speaking, minorities do not receive a better solution of their

problem by integration, even with axioms, statutes, autonomies, inde-

pendences. Their tactics necessarily go that route. But if they are revolu-

tionary, it is because they carry within them a deeper movement that

challenges the worldwide axiomatic. The power of minority, of particu-

larity, finds its figure or its universal consciousness in the proletariat. But

as long as the working class defines itself by an acquired status, or even by

a theoretically conquered State, it appears only as "capital," a part of cap-

ital (variable capital), and does not leave the plan(e) of capital. At best, the

plan(e) becomes bureaucratic. On the other hand, it is by leaving the

plan(e) of capital, and never ceasing to leave it, that a mass becomes

increasingly revolutionary and destroys the dominant equilibrium of the

denumerable sets.

It is hard to see what an Amazon-State would be, a

women's State, or a State of erratic workers, a State of the "refusal" of

work. If minorities do not constitute viable States culturally, politically,

economically, it is because the State-form is not appropriate to them, nor

the axiomatic of capital, nor the corresponding culture. We have often

seen capitalism maintain and organize inviable States, according to its

needs, and for the precise purpose of crushing minorities. The minorities

issue is instead that of smashing capitalism, of redefining socialism, of

constituting a war machine capable of countering the world war machine

by other means.

If the two solutions of extermination and integration hardly seem possi-

ble, it is due to the deepest law of capitalism: it continually sets and then

repels its own limits, but in so doing gives rise to numerous flows in all

directions that escape its axiomatic. At the same time as capitalism is effec-
tuated in the denumerable sets serving as its models, it necessarily consti-
tutes nondenumerable sets that cut across and disrupt those models. It does

not effect the "conjugation" of the deterritorialized and decoded flows

without those flows forging farther ahead; without their escaping both the

axiomatic that conjugates them and the models that reterritorialize them;

without their tending to enter into "connections" that delineate a new

Land; without their constituting a war machine whose aim is neither the

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war of extermination nor the peace of generalized terror, but revolutionary

movement (the connection of flows, the composition of nondenumerable

aggregates, the becoming-minoritarian of everybody/everything). This is

not a dispersion or a fragmentation: we are instead back at the opposition
between, on the one hand, a plane of consistency and, on the other, the plane
of organization and development of capital and the bureaucratic socialist
plane. There is in each case a constructivism, a "diagrammatism," operat-

ing by the determination of the conditions of the problem and by transver-

sal links between problems: it opposes both the automation of the capitalist

axioms and bureaucratic programming. From this standpoint, when we

talk about "undecidable propositions," we are not referring to the uncer-

tainty of the results, which is necessarily a part of every system. We are

referring, on the contrary, to the coexistence and inseparability of that

which the system conjugates, and that which never ceases to escape it fol-

lowing lines of flight that are themselves connectable. The undecidable is

the germ and locus par excellence of revolutionary decisions. Some people

invoke the high technology of the world system of enslavement; but even,

and especially, this machinic enslavement abounds in undecidable

propositions and movements that, far from belonging to a domain of

knowledge reserved for sworn specialists, provides so many weapons for

the becoming of everybody/everything, becoming-radio,

becoming-electronic, becoming-molecular.. ,

Every struggle is a function

of all of these undecidable propositions and constructs revolutionary
connections in opposition to the conjugations of the axiomatic.

1440:

THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED □ 475

the desert gains and grows; and the two can happen simultaneously. But the

de facto mixes do not preclude a de jure, or abstract, distinction between

the two spaces. That there is such a distinction is what accounts for the fact

that the two spaces do not communicate with each other in the same way: it

is the de jure distinction that determines the forms assumed by a given de

facto mix and the direction or meaning of the mix (is a smooth space cap-

tured, enveloped by a striated space, or does a striated space dissolve into a

smooth space, allow a smooth space to develop?). This raises a number of

simultaneous questions: the simple oppositions between the two spaces;

the complex differences; the de facto mixes, and the passages from one to

another; the principles of the mixture, which are not at all symmetrical,

sometimes causing a passage from the smooth to the striated, sometimes

from the striated to the smooth, according to entirely different move-

ments. We must therefore envision a certain number of models, which

would be like various aspects of the two spaces and the relations between

them.

The Technological Model. A fabric presents in principle a certain number

of characteristics that permit us to define it as a striated space. First, it is

constituted by two kinds of parallel elements; in the simplest case, there are

vertical and horizontal elements, and the two intertwine, intersect perpen-

dicularly. Second, the two kinds of elements have different functions; one

is fixed, the other mobile, passing above and beneath the fixed.

Leroi-Gourhan has analyzed this particular figure of "supple solids" in

basketry and weaving: stake and thread, warp and woof.' Third, a striated

space of this kind is necessarily delimited, closed on at least one side: the

fabric can be infinite in length but not in width, which is determined by

the frame of the warp; the necessity of a back and forth motion implies a

closed space (circular or cylindrical figures are themselves closed).

Finally, a space of this kind seems necessarily to have a top and a bottom;

even when the warp yarn and woof yarn are exactly the same in nature,

number, and density, weaving reconstitutes a bottom by placing the knots

on one side. Was it not these characteristics that enabled Plato to use the

model of weaving as the paradigm for "royal science," in other words, the

art of governing people or operating the State apparatus?

Felt is a supple solid product that proceeds altogether differently, as an

anti-fabric. It implies no separation of threads, no intertwining, only an

entanglement of fibers obtained by fulling (for example, by rolling the

block of fibers back and forth). What becomes entangled are the

microscales of the fibers. An aggregate of intrication of this kind is in no

way homogeneous: it is nevertheless smooth, and contrasts point by point

with the space of fabric (it is in principle infinite, open, and unlimited in

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1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED

every direction; it has neither top nor bottom nor center; it does not assign

fixed and mobile elements but rather distributes a continuous variation).

Even the technologists who express grave doubts about the nomads' pow-

ers of innovation at least give them credit for felt: a splendid insulator, an

ingenious invention, the raw material for tents, clothes, and armor among

the Turco-Mongols. Of course, the nomads of Africa and the Maghreb

instead treat wool as a fabric. Although it might entail displacing the oppo-

sition, do we not detect two very different conceptions or even practices of

weaving, the distinction between which would be something like the dis-

tinction between fabric as a whole and felt? For among sedentaries,

clothes-fabric and tapestry-fabric tend to annex the body and exterior

space, respectively, to the immobile house: fabric integrates the body and

the outside into a closed space. On the other hand, the weaving of the

nomad indexes clothing and the house itself to the space of the outside, to

the open smooth space in which the body moves.

There are many interfacings, mixes between felt and fabric. Can we not

displace the opposition yet again? In knitting, for example, the needles pro-

duce a striated space; one of them plays the role of the warp, the other of the

woof, but by turns. Crochet, on the other hand, draws an open space in all

directions, a space that is prolongable in all directions—but still has a cen-

ter. A more significant distinction would be between embroidery, with its

central theme or motif, and patchwork, with its piece-by-piece construc-

tion, its infinite, successive additions of fabric. Of course, embroidery's

variables and constants, fixed and mobile elements, may be of extraordi-

nary complexity. Patchwork, for its part, may display equivalents to

themes, symmetries, and resonance that approximate it to embroidery.

But the fact remains that its space is not at all constituted in the same way:

there is no center; its basic motif ("block") is composed of a single element;

the recurrence of this element frees uniquely rhythmic values distinct from

the harmonies of embroidery (in particular, in "crazy" patchwork, which

fits together pieces of varying size, shape, and color, and plays on the tex-
ture of the fabrics). "She had been working on it for fifteen years, carrying

about with her a shapeless bag of dingy, threadbare brocade containing

odds and ends of colored fabric in all possible shapes. She could never

bring herself to trim them to any pattern; so she shifted and fitted and

mused and fitted and shifted them like pieces of a patient puzzle-picture,

trying to fit them to a pattern or create a pattern out of them without using

her scissors, smoothing her colored scraps with flaccid, putty-colored fin-

gers."

An amorphous collection of juxtaposed pieces that can be joined

together in an infinite number of ways: we see that patchwork is literally a

Riemannian space, or vice versa. That is why very special work groups

were formed for patchwork fabrication (the importance of the quilting bee

1440:

THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED D 477

in America, and its role from the standpoint of a women's collectivity). The

smooth space of patchwork is adequate to demonstrate that "smooth" does

not mean homogeneous, quite the contrary: it is an amorphous, nonformal

space prefiguring op art.

The story of the quilt is particularly interesting in this connection. A

quilt comprises two layers of fabric stitched together, often with a filler in

between. Thus it is possible for there to be no top or bottom. If we follow

the history of the quilt over a short migration sequence (the settlers who

left Europe for the New World), we see that there is a shift from a formula

dominated by embroidery (so-called "plain" quilts) to a patchwork for-

mula ("applique quilts," and above all "pieced quilts"). The first settlers

of the seventeenth century brought with them plain quilts, embroidered

and striated spaces of extreme beauty. But toward the end of the century

patchwork technique was developed more and more, at first due to the

scarcity of textiles (leftover fabric, pieces salvaged from used clothes,

remnants taken from the "scrap bag"), and later due to the popularity of

Indian chintz. It is as though a smooth space emanated, sprang from a

striated space, but not without a correlation between the two, a recapitu-

lation of one in the other, a furtherance of one through the other. Yet the

complex difference persists. Patchwork, in conformity with migration,

whose degree of affinity with nomadism it shares, is not only named after

trajectories, but "represents" trajectories, becomes inseparable from

speed or movement in an open space.

The Musical Model. Pierre Boulez was the first to develop a set of simple

oppositions and complex differences, as well as reciprocal nonsymmetrical

correlations, between smooth and striated space. He created these con-

cepts and words in the field of music, defining them on several levels pre-

cisely in order to account for the abstract distinction at the same time as the

concrete mixes. In the simplest terms, Boulez says that in a smooth

space-time one occupies without counting, whereas in a striated

space-time one counts in order to occupy. He makes palpable or

perceptible the difference between nonmetric and metric multiplicities,

directional and dimensional spaces. He renders them sonorous or

musical. Undoubtedly, his personal work is composed of these relations,

created or recreated musically.

At a second level, it can be said that space is susceptible to two kinds of

breaks: one is defined by a standard, whereas the other is irregular and

undetermined, and can be made wherever one wishes to place it. At yet

another level, it can be said that frequencies can be distributed either in the

intervals between breaks, or statistically without breaks. In the first case,

the principle behind the distribution of breaks and intervals is called a

"module"; it may be constant and fixed (a straight striated space), or

478 □

1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED

regularly or irregularly variable (curved striated spaces, termed focalized if

the variation of the module is regular, nonfocalized if it is irregular). When

there is no module, the distribution of frequencies is without break: it is

"statistical," however small the segment of space may be; it still has two

aspects, however, depending on whether the distribution is equal

(nondirected smooth space), or more or less rare or dense (directed smooth

space). Can we say that in the kind of smooth space that is without break or

module there is no interval? Or, on the contrary, has everything become

interval, intermezzo? The smooth is a nomos, whereas the striated always

has a logos, the octave, for example. Boulez is concerned with the commu-

nication between the two kinds of space, their alternations and superposi-

tions: how "a strongly directed smooth space tends to meld with a striated

space," how "a striated space in which the statistical distribution of the

pitches used is in fact equal tends to meld with a smooth space";

how the

octave can be replaced by "non-octave-forming scales" that reproduce

themselves through a principle of spiraling; how "texture" can be crafted in

such a way as to lose fixed and homogeneous values, becoming a support

for slips in tempo, displacements of intervals, and son art transformations

comparable to the transformations of op art.

Returning to the simple opposition, the striated is that which inter-

twines fixed and variable elements, produces an order and succession of

distinct forms, and organizes horizontal melodic lines and vertical har-

monic planes. The smooth is the continuous variation, continuous devel-

opment of form; it is the fusion of harmony and melody in favor of the

production of properly rythmic values, the pure act of the drawing of a

diagonal across the vertical and the horizontal.

The Maritime Model. Of course, there are points, lines, and surfaces in

striated space as well as in smooth space (there are also volumes, but we will

leave this question aside for the time being). In striated space, lines or tra-

jectories tend to be subordinated to points: one goes from one point to

another. In the smooth, it is the opposite: the points are subordinated to the

trajectory. This was already the case among the nomads for the

clothes-tent-space vector of the outside. The dwelling is subordinated to

the journey; inside space conforms to outside space: tent, igloo, boat.

There are stops and trajectories in both the smooth and the striated. But

in smooth space, the stop follows from the trajectory; once again, the

interval takes all, the interval is substance (forming the basis for rhythmic

values).

In smooth space, the line is therefore a vector, a direction and not a

dimension or metric determination. It is a space constructed by local oper-

ations involving changes in direction. These changes in direction may be

due to the nature of the journey itself, as with the nomads of the archipela-

1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED D 479

goes (a case of "directed" smooth space); but it is more likely to be due to

the variability of the goal or point to be attained, as with the nomads of the

desert who head toward local, temporary vegetation (a "nondirected"

smooth space). Directed or not, and especially in the latter case, smooth

space is directional rather than dimensional or metric. Smooth space is

filled by events or haecceities, far more than by formed and perceived

things. It is a space of affects, more than one of properties. It is haptic rather

than optical perception. Whereas in the striated forms organize a matter,

in the smooth materials signal forces and serve as symptoms for them. It is

an intensive rather than extensive space, one of distances, not of measures

and properties. Intense Spatium instead of Extensio. A Body without

Organs instead of an organism and organization. Perception in it is based

on symptoms and evaluations rather than measures and properties. That is

why smooth space is occupied by intensities, wind and noise, forces, and

sonorous and tactile qualities, as in the desert, steppe, or ice.

The creaking

of ice and the song of the sands. Striated space, on the contrary, is can-

opied by the sky as measure and by the measurable visual qualities deriv-

ing from it.

This is where the very special problem of the sea enters in. For the sea is a

smooth space par excellence, and yet was the first to encounter the

demands of increasingly strict striation. The problem did not arise in prox-

imity to land. On the contrary, the striation of the sea was a result of naviga-

tion on the open water. Maritime space was striated as a function of two

astronomical and geographical gains: bearings, obtained by a set of calcula-

tions based on exact observation of the stars and the sun; and the map,

which intertwines meridians and parallels, longitudes and latitudes, plot-

ting regions known and unknown onto a grid (like a Mendeleyev table).

Must we accept the Portuguese argument and assign 1440 as the turning

point that marked the first decisive striation, and set the stage for the great

discoveries? Rather, we will follow Pierre Chaunu when he speaks of an

extended confrontation at sea between the smooth and the striated during

the course of which the striated progressively took hold.

For before longi-

tude lines had been plotted, a very late development, there existed a com-

plex and empirical nomadic system of navigation based on the wind and

noise, the colors and sounds of the seas; then came a directional,

preastronomical or already astronomical, system of navigation employing

only latitude, in which there was no possibility of "taking one's bearings,"

and which had only portolanos lacking "translatable generalization"

instead of true maps; finally, improvements upon this primitive astronom-

ical navigation were made under the very special conditions of the lati-

tudes of the Indian Ocean, then of the elliptical circuits of the Atlantic

(straight and curved spaces).

It is as if the sea were not only the archetype

480 □

1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED

of all smooth spaces but the first to undergo a gradual striation gridding it

in one place, then another, on this side and that. The commercial cities par-

ticipated in this striation, and were often innovators; but only the States

were capable of carrying it to completion, of raising it to the global level of a

"politics of science."

A dimensionality that subordinated directionality,

or superimposed itself upon it, became increasingly entrenched.

This is undoubtedly why the sea, the archetype of smooth space, was

also the archetype of all striations of smooth space: the striation of the

desert, the air, the stratosphere (prompting Virilio to speak of a "vertical

coastline," as a change in direction). It was at sea that smooth space was

first subjugated and a model found for the laying-out and imposition of

striated space, a model later put to use elsewhere. This does not contradict

Virilio's other hypothesis: in the aftermath of striation, the sea reimparts a

kind of smooth space, occupied first by the "fleet in being," then by the per-

petual motion of the strategic submarine, which outflanks all gridding and

invents a neonomadism in the service of a war machine still more disturb-

ing than the States, which reconstitute it at the limit of their striations. The

sea, then the air and the stratosphere, become smooth spaces again, but, in

the strangest of reversals, it is for the purpose of controlling striated space

more completely.

The smooth always possesses a greater power of

deterritorialization than the striated. When examining the new profes-

sions, or new classes even, how can one fail to mention the military techni-

cians who stare into screens night and day and live for long stretches in

strategic submarines (in the future it will be on satellites), and the apoca-

lyptic eyes and ears they have fashioned for themselves, which can barely

distinguish any more between a natural phenomenon, a swarm of locusts,

and an "enemy" attack originating at any given point? All of this serves as a

reminder that the smooth itself can be drawn and occupied by diabolical

powers of organization; value judgments aside, this demonstrates above all

that there exist two nonsymmetrical movements, one of which striates the

smooth, and one of which reimparts smooth space on the basis of the stri-

ated. (Do not new smooth spaces, or holey spaces, arise as parries even in

relation to the smooth space of a worldwide organization? Virilio invokes

the beginnings of subterranean habitation in the "mineral layer," which

can take on very diverse values.)

Let us return to the simple opposition between the smooth and the stri-

ated since we are not yet at the point where we can consider the dis-

symmetrical and concrete mixes. The smooth and the striated are

distinguished first of all by an inverse relation between the point and the

line (in the case of the striated, the line is between two points, while in the

smooth, the point is between two lines); and second, by the nature of the

line (smooth-directional, open intervals; dimensional-striated, closed

1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED □ 481

intervals). Finally, there is a third difference, concerning the surface or

space. In striated space, one closes off a surface and "allocates" it according

to determinate intervals, assigned breaks; in the smooth, one "distributes"

oneself in an open space, according to frequencies and in the course of

one's crossings (logos and nomos).

As simple as this opposition is, it is not

easy to place it. We cannot content ourselves with establishing an immedi-

ate opposition between the smooth ground of the nomadic animal raiser

and the striated land of the sedentary cultivator. It is evident that the peas-

ant, even the sedentary peasant, participates fully in the space of the wind,

the space of tactile and sonorous qualities. When the ancient Greeks speak

of the open space of the nomos—nondelimited, unpartitioned; the

pre-urban countryside; mountainside, plateau, steppe—they oppose it not

to cultivation, which may actually be part of it, but to the polis, the city,

the town. When Ibn Khaldun speaks oibadiya, bedouinism, the term

covers cultivators as well as nomadic animal raisers: he contrasts it to
hadara, or "city life." This clarification is certainly important, but it does

not change much. For from the most ancient of times, from Neolithic and

even Paleolithic times, it is the town that invents agriculture: it is through the

actions of the town that the farmers and their striated space are superposed

upon the cultivators operating in a still smooth space (the transhumant

cultivator, half-sedentary or already completely sedentary). So on this

level we reencounter the simple opposition we began by challenging,

between farmers and nomads, striated land and smooth ground: but only

after a detour through the town as a force of striation. Now not only the

sea, desert, steppe, and air are the sites of a contest between the smooth

and the striated, but the earth itself, depending on whether there is

cultivation in nomos-space or agriculture in city-space. Must we not say

the same of the city itself? In contrast to the sea, the city is the striated space

par excellence; the sea is a smooth space fundamentally open to striation,

and the city is the force of striation that reimparts smooth space, puts it

back into operation everywhere, on earth and in the other elements, outside

but also inside itself. The smooth spaces arising from the city are not only

those of worldwide organization, but also of a counterattack combining

the smooth and the holey and turning back against the town: sprawling,

temporary, shifting shantytowns of nomads and cave dwellers, scrap

metal and fabric, patchwork, to which the striations of money, work, or

housing are no longer even relevant. An explosive misery secreted by the

city, and corresponding to Thorn's mathematical formula: "retroactive

smoothing."

Condensed force, the potential for counterattack?

In each instance, then, the simple opposition "smooth-striated" gives

rise to far more difficult complications, alternations, and superpositions.

But these complications basically confirm the distinction, precisely

482 □ 1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED

because they bring dissymmetrical movements into play. For now, it suf-

fices to say that there are two kinds of voyage, distinguished by the respec-

tive role of the point, line, and space. Goethe travel and Kleist travel?

French travel and English (or American) travel? Tree travel and rhizome

travel? But nothing completely coincides, and everything intermingles, or

crosses over. This is because the differences are not objective: it is possible

to live striated on the deserts, steppes, or seas; it is possible to live smooth

even in the cities, to be an urban nomad (for example, a stroll taken by

Henry Miller in Clichy or Brooklyn is a nomadic transit in smooth space;

he makes the city disgorge a patchwork, differentials of speed, delays and

accelerations, changes in orientation, continuous variations ... The beat-

niks owe much to Miller, but they changed direction again, they put the

space outside the cities to new use). Fitzgerald said it long ago: it is not a

question of taking off for the South Seas, that is not what determines a voy-

age. There are not only strange voyages in the city but voyages in place: we

are not thinking of drug users, whose experience is too ambiguous, but of

true nomads. We can say of the nomads, following Toynbee's suggestion:
they do not move. They are nomads by dint of not moving, not migrating, of

holding a smooth space that they refuse to leave, that they leave only in

order to conquer and die. Voyage in place: that is the name of all intensities,

even if they also develop in extension. To think is to voyage; earlier we tried

to establish a theo-noological model of smooth and striated spaces. In

short, what distinguishes the two kinds of voyages is neither a measurable

quantity of movement, nor something that would be only in the mind, but

the mode of spatialization, the manner of being in space, of being for space.

Voyage smoothly or in striation, and think the same way... But there are

always passages from one to the other, transformations of one within the

other, reversals. In his film, Kings of the Road, Wenders intersects and

superposes the paths of two characters; one of them takes a still educa-

tional, memorial, cultural, Goethean journey that is thoroughly striated,

whereas the other has already conquered smooth space, and only experi-

ments, induces amnesia in the German "desert." But oddly enough, it is the

former who opens space for himself and performs a kind of retroactive

smoothing, whereas striae reform around the latter, closing his space again.

Voyaging smoothly is a becoming, and a difficult, uncertain becoming at

that. It is not a question of returning to preastronomical navigation, nor to

the ancient nomads. The confrontation between the smooth and the stri-

ated, the passages, alternations and superpositions, are under way today,

running in the most varied directions.

The Mathematical Model. It was a decisive event when the mathematician

Riemann uprooted the multiple from its predicate state and made it a

1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED □ 483

noun, "multiplicity." It marked the end of dialectics and the beginning of a

typology and topology of multiplicities. Each multiplicity was defined by n

determinations; sometimes the determinations were independent of the

situation, and sometimes they depended upon it. For example, the magni-

tude of a vertical line between two points can be compared to the magni-

tude of a horizontal line between two other points: it is clear that the

multiplicity in this case is metric, that it allows itself to be striated, and that

its determinations are magnitudes. On the other hand, two sounds of equal

pitch and different intensity cannot be compared to two sounds of equal

intensity and different pitch; in this case, two determinations can be com-

pared only "if one is a part of the other and if we restrict ourselves to the

judgment that the latter is smaller than the former, without being able to

say by how much."

Multiplicities of this second kind are not metric and

allow themselves to be striated and measured only by indirect means,

which they always resist. They are anexact yet rigorous. Meinong and

Russell opposed the notion of distance to that of magnitude.

Distances

are not, strictly speaking, indivisible: they can be divided precisely in cases

where the situation of one determination makes it part of another. But

unlike magnitudes, they cannot divide without changing in nature each
time. An intensity, for example, is not composed of addable and

displace-able magnitudes: a temperature is not the sum of two smaller

temperatures, a speed is not the sum of two smaller speeds. Since each

intensity is itself a difference, it divides according to an order in which each

term of the division differs in nature from the others. Distance is therefore

a set of ordered differences, in other words, differences that are enveloped

in one another in such a way that it is possible to judge which is larger or

smaller, but not their exact magnitudes. For example, one can divide

movement into the gallop, trot, and walk, but in such a way that what is

divided changes in nature at each moment of the division, without any one

of these moments entering into the composition of any other. Therefore

these multiplicities of "distance" are inseparable from a process of

continuous variation, whereas multiplicities of "magnitude" distribute

constants and variables.

That is why we consider Bergson to be of major importance (much more

so than Husserl, or even Meinong or Russell) in the development of the the-

ory of multiplicities. Beginning in Time and Free Will, he presents dura-

tion as a type of multiplicity opposed to metric multiplicity or the

multiplicity of magnitude. Duration is in no way indivisible, but is that

which cannot be divided without changing in nature at each division

(Achilles' running is not divided into steps, his steps do not compose it in

the manner of magnitudes).

On the other hand, in a multiplicity such as

homogeneous extension, the division can be carried as far as one likes

484 □

1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED

without changing anything in the constant object; or the magnitudes can

vary with no other result than an increase or a decrease in the amount of

space they striate. Bergson thus brought to light "two very different kinds

of multiplicity," one qualitative and fusional, continuous, the other

numerical and homogeneous, discrete. It will be noted that matter goes

back and forth between the two; sometimes it is already enveloped in quali-

tative multiplicity, sometimes already developed in a metric "schema"

that draws it outside of itself. The confrontation between Bergson and

Einstein on the topic of Relativity is incomprehensible if one fails to place

it in the context of the basic theory of Riemannian multiplicities, as modi-

fied by Bergson.

We have on numerous occasions encountered all kinds of differences

between two types of multiplicities: metric and nonmetric; extensive and

qualitative; centered and acentered; arborescent and rhizomatic; numeri-

cal and flat; dimensional and directional; of masses and of packs; of magni-

tude and of distance; of breaks and of frequency; striated and smooth. Not

only is that which peoples a smooth space a multiplicity that changes in

nature when it divides—such as tribes in the desert: constantly modified

distances, packs that are always undergoing metamorphosis—but smooth

space itself, desert, steppe, sea, or ice, is a multiplicity of this type,

non-metric, acentered, directional, etc. Now it might be thought that the

Number would belong exclusively to the other multiplicities, that it

would accord them the scientific status nonmetric multiplicities lack. But

this is only partially true. It is true that the number is the correlate of the

metric: magnitudes can striate space only by reference to numbers, and

conversely, numbers are used to express increasingly complex relations

between magnitudes, thus giving rise to ideal spaces reinforcing the

striation and making it coextensive with all of matter. There is therefore a

correlation within metric multiplicities between geometry and arithmetic,

geometry and algebra, which is constitutive of major science (the most

profound authors in this respect are those who have seen that the number,

even in its simplest forms, is exclusively cardinal in character, and the unit

exclusively divisible).

It could be said on the other hand that nonmetric

multiplicities or the multiplicities of smooth space pertain only to a minor

geometry that is purely operative and qualitative, in which calculation is

necessarily very limited, and the local operations of which are not even

capable of general translatability or a homogeneous system of location.

Yet this "inferiority" is only apparent; for the independence of this nearly

illiterate, ametric geometry is what makes possible the independence of the

number, the subsequent function of which is to measure magnitudes in

striated space (or to striate). The number distributes itself in smooth

space; it does not divide without changing nature each time, without

changing units, each of which

1440:

THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED □ 485

represents a distance and not a magnitude. The ordinal, directional, no-

madic, articulated number, the numbering number, pertains to smooth

space, just as the numbered number pertains to striated space. So we may

say of every multiplicity that it is already a number, and still a unit. But the

number and the unit, and even the way in which the unit divides, are differ-

ent in each case. Minor science is continually enriching major science,

communicating its intuitions to it, its way of proceeding, its itinerancy, its

sense of and taste for matter, singularity, variation, intuitionist geometry

and the numbering number.

But so far we have only considered the first aspect of smooth and

nonmetric multiplicities, as opposed to metric multiplicities: how the situ-

ation of one determination can make it part of another without our being

able either to assign that situation an exact magnitude or common unit, or

to discount it. This is the enveloping or enveloped character of smooth

space. But there is a second, more important, aspect: when the situation of

the two determinations precludes their comparison. As we know, this is the

case for Riemannian spaces, or rather, Riemannian patches of space:

"Riemann spaces are devoid of any kind of homogeneity. Each is charac-

terized by the form of the expression that defines the square of the distance

between two infinitely proximate points.... It follows that two neighbor-

ing observers in a Riemann space can locate the points in their immediate

vicinity but cannot locate their spaces in relation to each other without a

new convention. Each vicinity is therefore like a shred of Euclidean space,
but the linkage between one vicinity and the next is not defined and can be
effected in an infinite number of ways. Riemann space at its most general
thus presents itself as an amorphous collection of pieces that are juxtaposed
but not attached to each other." It is possible to define this multiplicity

without any reference to a metrical system, in terms of the conditions of

frequency, or rather accumulation, of a set of vicinities; these conditions

are entirely different from those determining metric spaces and their

breaks (even though a relation between the two kinds of space necessarily

results).

In short, if we follow Lautman's fine description, Riemannian

space is pure patchwork. It has connections, or tactile relations. It has

rhythmic values not found elsewhere, even though they can be translated

into a metric space. Heterogeneous, in continuous variation, it is a smooth

space, insofar as smooth space is amorphous and not homogeneous. We

can thus define two positive characteristics of smooth space in general:

when there are determinations that are part of one another and pertain to

enveloped distances or ordered differences, independent of magnitude;

when, independent of metrics, determinations arise that cannot be part of

one another but are connected by processes of frequency or accumulation.

These are the two aspects of the nomos of smooth space.

486 □

1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED

We are always, however, brought back to a dissymmetrical necessity to

cross from the smooth to the striated, and from the striated to the smooth.

If it is true that itinerant geometry and the nomadic number of smooth

spaces are a constant inspiration to royal science and striated space, con-

versely, the metrics of striated spaces {metrori) is indispensable for the

translation of the strange data of a smooth multiplicity. Translating is not a

simple act: it is not enough to substitute the space traversed for the move-

ment; a series of rich and complex operations is necessary (Bergson was the

first to make this point). Neither is translating a secondary act. It is an oper-

ation that undoubtedly consists in subjugating, overcoding, metricizing

smooth space, in neutralizing it, but also in giving it a milieu of propaga-

tion, extension, refraction, renewal, and impulse without which it would

perhaps die of its own accord: like a mask without which it could neither

breathe nor find a general form of expression. Major science has a perpet-

ual need for the inspiration of the minor; but the minor would be nothing if

it did not confront and conform to the highest scientific requirements. Let

us take just two examples of the richness and necessity of translations,

which include as many opportunities for openings as risks of closure or

stoppage: first, the complexity of the means by which one translates inten-

sities into extensive quantities, or more generally, multiplicities of dis-

tance into systems of magnitudes that measure and striate them (the role of

logarithms in this connection); second, and more important, the delicacy

and complexity of the means by which Riemannian patches of smooth

space receive a Euclidean conjunction (the role of the parallelism of vectors

in striating the infinitesimal).

The mode of connection proper to patches

of Riemannian space ("accumulation") is not to be confused with the

Euclidean conjunction of Riemann space ("parallelism"). Yet the two are

linked and give each other impetus. Nothing is ever done with: smooth

space allows itself to be striated, and striated space reimparts a smooth

space, with potentially very different values, scope, and signs. Perhaps we

must say that all progress is made by and in striated space, but all becoming

occurs in smooth space.

Is it possible to give a very general mathematical definition of smooth

spaces? Benoit Mandelbrot's "fractals" seem to be on that path. Fractals

are aggregates whose number of dimensions is fractional rather than

whole, or else whole but with continuous variation in direction. An exam-

ple would be a line segment whose central third is replaced by the angle of

an equilateral triangle; the operation is repeated for the four resulting seg-

ments, and so on ad infinitum, following a relation of similarity—such a

segment would constitute an infinite line or curve with a dimension

greater than one, but less than a surface (= 2). Similar results can be

1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED □ 487

Von Koch's curve: more than a line, less
than a surface. The middle third of
segment AE (1) is removed and
replaced with the traingle BCD (2). In
(3), this operation is repeated sepa-
rately for each of the segments/l/?, AC,
CD, and DE. This yields an angled line
of equal segments (4), and so on, ad
infinitum. The end result is a "curve"
composed of an infinite number of
angled points that preclude any tan-
gent being drawn to any of their
points. The length of the curve is infi-
nite and its dimension is higher than
one: it represents a space of 1.261859
dimensions (log 4/log 3 exactly).

Sierpensky's sponge: more than a surface, less
than a volume. The law according to which this
cube was hollowed can be understood intui-
tively at a glance. Each square hole is sur-
rounded by eight holes a third its size. These
holes are in turn surrounded by eight holes, also
a third their size. And so on, endlessly. The illus-
trator could not represent the infinity of holes
of decreasing size beyond the fourth degree, but
it is plain to see that this cube is in the end infi-
nitely hollow. Its total volume approaches zero,
while the total lateral surface of the hollowings
infinitely grows. This space has a dimension of
2.7268. It therefore lies between a surface (with
a dimension of 2) and a volume (with a dimen-
sion of 3). "Sierpinsky's rug" is one face of this
cube; the hollowings are then squares and the
dimension of the "surface" is 1.2618. From
Studies in Geometry by Leonard M.
Blu-menthal and Karl Menger. Copyright ©
1970 W. H. Freeman and Company.
Reprinted with permission.

Concerning Benoit Mandelbrot's "Fractals"

obtained by making holes, by cutting, "windows" into a circle, instead of

adding "points" to a triangle; likewise, a cube into which holes are drilled

according to the principle of similarity becomes less than a volume but

more than a surface (this is the mathematical presentation of the affinity

between a free space and a holey space). In still other forms, Brownian

motion, turbulence, and the sky are "fractals" of this kind.

Perhaps this

provides us with another way of defining fuzzy aggregates. But the main

thing is that it provides a general determination for smooth space that

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488 □

1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED

takes into account its differences from and relations to striated space: (1)

we shall call striated or metric any aggregate with a whole number of

dimensions, and for which it is possible to assign constant directions; (2)

nonmetric smooth space is constituted by the construction of a line with a

fractional number of dimensions greater than one, or of a surface with a

fractional number of dimensions greater than two; (3) a fractional number

of dimensions is the index of a properly directional space (with continuous

variation in direction, and without tangent); (4) what defines smooth

space, then, is that it does not have a dimension higher than that which

moves through it or is inscribed in it; in this sense it is a flat multiplicity, for

example, a line that fills a plane without ceasing to be a line; (5) space and

that which occupies space tend to become identified, to have the same

power, in the anexact yet rigorous form of the numbering or nonwhole

number (occupy without counting); (6) a smooth, amorphous space of this

kind is constituted by an accumulation of proximities, and each accumula-

tion defines a zone of indiscernibility proper to "becoming" (more than a

line and less than a surface; less than a volume and more than a surface).

The Physical Model. The various models confirm a certain idea of

stria-tion: two series of parallels that intersect perpendicularly, some of

which, the verticals, are more in the role of fixed elements or constants,

whereas the others, the horizontals, are more in the role of variables. This is

roughly the case for the warp and the woof, harmony and melody, longitude

and latitude. The more regular the intersection, the tighter the striation, the

more homogeneous the space tends to become; it is for this reason that

from the beginning homogeneity did not seem to us to be a characteristic

of smooth space, but on the contrary, the extreme result of striation, or the

limit-form of a space striated everywhere and in all directions. If the

smooth and the homogeneous seem to communicate, it is only because

when the striated attains its ideal of perfect homogeneity, it is apt to

reimpart smooth space, by a movement that superposes itself upon that of

the homogeneous but remains entirely different from it. In each model,

the smooth actually seemed to pertain to a fundamental heterogeneity: felt

or patchwork rather than weaving, rhythmic values rather than

harmony-melody, Riemannian space rather than Euclidean space—a

continuous variation that exceeds any distribution of constants and

variables, the freeing of a line that does not pass between two points, the

formation of a plane that does not proceed by parallel and perpendicular

lines.

The link between the homogeneous and the striated can be expressed in

terms of an imaginary, elementary physics. (1) You begin by striating space

with parallel gravitational verticals. (2) The resultant of these parallels or

forces is applied to a point inside the body occupying the space {center of

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THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED □ 489

gravity). (3) The position of this point does not change when the direction

of the parallel forces is changed, when they become perpendicular to their

original direction. (4) You discover that gravity is a particular case of a uni-

versal attraction following straight lines or biunivocal relations between

two bodies. (5) You define a general notion of workas a force-displacement

relation in a certain direction. (6) You then have the physical basis for an

increasingly perfect striated space, running not only vertically and hori-

zontally, but in every direction subordinated to points.

It is not even necessary to invoke this Newtonian pseudophysics. The

Greeks already went from a space striated vertically, top to bottom, to a

centered space with reversible and symmetrical relations in all directions,

in other words, striated in every direction in such a way as to constitute a

homogeneity. There is no question that these are like two models of the

State apparatus, the vertical apparatus of the empire and the isotropic

apparatus of the city-state.

Geometry lies at the crossroads of a physics

problem and an affair of the State.

It is obvious that the striation thus constituted has its limits: they are

reached not only when the infinite (either infinitely large or small) is

brought in, but also when more than two bodies are considered ("the

three-body problem"). Let us try to understand in the simplest terms how

space escapes the limits of its striation. At one pole, it escapes them by
declination, in other words, by the smallest deviation, by the infinitely

small deviation between a gravitational vertical and the arc of a circle to

which the vertical is tangent. At the other pole, it escapes them by the spiral
or vortex, in other words, a figure in which all the points of space are

simultaneously occupied according to laws of frequency or of

accumulation, distribution; these laws are distinct from the so-called

laminar distribution corresponding to the striation of parallels. From the

smallest deviation to the vortex there is a valid and necessary relation of

consequence: what stretches between them is precisely a smooth space

whose element is declination and which is peopled by a spiral. Smooth

space is constituted by the minimum angle, which deviates from the

vertical, and by the vortex, which overspills striation. The strength of

Michel Serres's book is that it demonstrates this link between the clinamen

as a generative differential element, and the formation of vortices and

turbulences insofar as they occupy an engendered smooth space; in fact,

the atom of the ancients, from Democritus to Lucretius, was always

inseparable from a hydraulics, or a generalized theory of swells and flows.

The ancient atom is entirely misunderstood if it is overlooked that its

essence is to course and flow. The theory of atomism is the basis for a

strict correlation between Archimedean geometry (very different from

the striated and homogeneous space of Euclid) and Democritean physics

(very different from solid or lamellar matter).

The

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same coincidence means that this aggregate is no longer tied in any way to a

State apparatus, but rather to a war machine: a physics of packs, turbu-

lences, "catastrophes," and epidemics corresponding to a geometry of war,

of the art of war and its machines. Serres states what he considers to be

Lucretius's deepest goal: to go from Mars to Venus, to place the war

machine in the service of peace.

But this operation is not accomplished

through the State apparatus; it expresses, on the contrary, an ultimate

metamorphosis of the war machine, and occurs in smooth space.

Earlier we encountered a distinction between "free action" in smooth

space and "work" in striated space. During the nineteenth century a two-

fold elaboration was undertaken: of a physicoscientific concept of Work

(weight-height, force-displacement), and of a socioeconomic concept of

labor-power or abstract labor (a homogeneous abstract quantity applicable

to all work, and susceptible to multiplication and division). There was a

profound link between physics and sociology: society furnished an eco-

nomic standard of measure for work, and physics a "mechanical currency"

for it. The wage regime had as its correlate a mechanics of force. Physics

had never been more social, for in both cases it was a question of defining

the constant mean value of a force of lift and pull exerted in the most uni-

form way possible by a standard-man. Impose the Work-model upon every

activity, translate every act into possible or virtual work, discipline free

action, or else (which amounts to the same thing) relegate it to "leisure,"

which exists only by reference to work. We now understand why the

Work-model, in both its physical and social aspects, is a fundamental part

of the State apparatus. Standard-man began as the man of public works.

It was not in relation to pin manufacturing that the problems of abstract

labor, the multiplication of its results, and the division of its operations

were first formulated; it was in public construction and in the organization

of armies (not only the disciplining of men, but also the industrial

production of weapons). Nothing more normal. The war machine in itself

did not imply this normalization. But the State apparatus, in the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, found a new way of appropriating

the war machine: by subjugating it before all else to the Work-model of the

construction site and factory, which were in the process of developing

elsewhere, but more slowly. The war machine was perhaps the first thing

to be striated, to produce an abstract labor-time whose results could be

multiplied and operations divided. That is where free action in smooth

space must have been conquered. The physicosocial model of Work

pertains to the State apparatus, it is one of its inventions, and for two

reasons. First, because labor appears only with the constitution of a
surplus, there is no labor that is not devoted to stockpiling; in fact, labor

(in the strict sense) begins only with what is called surplus labor. Second,

labor performs a generalized opera-

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THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED □ 491

tion of striation of space-time, a subjection of free action, a nullification of

smooth spaces, the origin and means of which is in the essential enterprise

of the State, namely, its conquest of the war machine.

Counterdemonstration: where there is no State and no surplus labor,

there is no Work-model either. Instead, there is the continuous variation of

free action, passing from speech to action, from a given action to another,

from action to song, from song to speech, from speech to enterprise, all in a

strange chromaticism with intense but rare peak moments or moments of

effort that the outside observer can only "translate" in terms of work. It is

true that it has been said of blacks through the ages that "they don't work,

they don't know what work is." It is true that they were forced to work, and

to work more than anyone else, in terms of abstract quantity. It also seems

to be true that the Indians had no understanding of, and were unsuited

for, any organization of work, even slavery: the Americans apparently

imported so many blacks only because they could not use the Indians, who

would rather die. Certain outstanding ethnologists have raised an essential

question. They have turned the problem around: so-called primitive socie-

ties are not societies of shortage or subsistence due to an absence of work,

but on the contrary are societies of free action and smooth space that have

no use for a work-factor, anymore than they constitute a stock.

They are

not societies of sloth, even though their differences with work may be

expressed in the form of a "right to laziness." They are not without laws,

even though their differences with the law may be expressed in the guise of

"anarchy." What they have instead is a law of the nomos regulating a con-

tinuous variation of activity with a rigor and cruelty all its own (get rid of

whatever cannot be transported, the old, children . . .).

If work constitutes a striated space-time corresponding to the State

apparatus, is this not especially true of its archaic or ancient forms? For it is

there that surplus labor is isolated, distinguished, in the form of tribute or

corvee. Consequently, it is there that the concept of labor appears at its

clearest, for example, in the large-scale works of the empires, the urban,

agricultural, or hydraulic works by which a "laminar" flow in supposedly

parallel layers (striation) is imposed upon the waters. It seems on the con-

trary that in the capitalist regime, surplus labor becomes less and less dis-

tinguishable from labor "strictly speaking," and totally impregnates it.

Modern public works have a different status from that of large-scale imper-

ial works. How could one possibly distinguish between the time necessary

for reproduction and "extorted" time, when they are no longer separated in

time? This remark certainly does not contradict the Marxist theory of sur-

plus value, for Marx shows precisely that surplus value ceases to be
localizable in the capitalist regime. That is even his fundamental contri-

bution. It gave him a sense that machines would themselves become

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productive of surplus value and that the circulation of capital would chal-

lenge the distinction between variable and constant capital. In these new

conditions, it remains true that all labor involves surplus labor; but surplus

labor no longer requires labor. Surplus labor, capitalist organization in its

entirety, operates less and less by the striation of space-time corresponding

to the physicosocial concept of work. Rather, it is as though human aliena-

tion through surplus labor were replaced by a generalized "machinic

enslavement," such that one may furnish surplus-value without doing any

work (children, the retired, the unemployed, television viewers, etc.). Not

only does the user as such tend to become an employee, but capitalism

operates less on a quantity of labor than by a complex qualitative process

bringing into play modes of transportation, urban models, the media, the

entertainment industries, ways of perceiving and feeling—every semiotic

system. It is as though, at the outcome of the striation that capitalism was

able to carry to an unequaled point of perfection, circulating capital neces-

sarily recreated, reconstituted, a sort of smooth space in which the destiny

of human beings is recast. Striation, of course, survives in the most perfect

and severest of forms (it is not only vertical but operates in all directions);

however, it relates primarily to the state pole of capitalism, in other words,

to the role of the modern State apparatuses in the organization of capital.

On the other hand, at the complementary and dominant level of integrated
(or rather integrating) world capitalism, a new smooth space is produced in

which capital reaches its "absolute" speed, based on machinic components

rather than the human component of labor. The multinationals fabricate a

kind of deterritorialized smooth space in which points of occupation as

well as poles of exchange become quite independent of the classical paths

to striation. What is really new are always the new forms of turnover. The

present-day accelerated forms of the circulation of capital are making the

distinctions between constant and variable capital, and even fixed and cir-

culating capital, increasingly relative; the essential thing is instead the dis-

tinction between striated capital and smooth capital, and the way in which

the former gives rise to the latter through complexes that cut across terri-

tories and States, and even the different types of States.

The Aesthetic Model: Nomad Art. Several notions, both practical and the-

oretical, are suitable for defining nomad art and its successors (barbarian,

Gothic, and modern). First, "close-range" vision, as distinguished from

long-distance vision; second, "tactile," or rather "haptic" space, as distin-

guished from optical space. "Haptic" is a better word than "tactile" since it

does not establish an opposition between two sense organs but rather

invites the assumption that the eye itself may fulfill this nonoptical func-

tion. It was Alois Riegl who, in some marvelous pages, gave fundamental

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THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED □ 493

aesthetic status to the couple, close vision-haptic space. But for the moment

we should set aside the criteria proposed by Riegl (then by Wilhelm

Worringer, and more recently by Henri Maldiney), and take some risks

ourselves, making free use of these notions.

It seems to us that the Smooth

is both the object of a close vision par excellence and the element of a haptic

space (which may be as much visual or auditory as tactile). The Striated, on

the contrary, relates to a more distant vision, and a more optical space—

although the eye in turn is not the only organ to have this capacity. Once

again, as always, this analysis must be corrected by a coefficient of transfor-

mation according to which passages between the striated and the smooth

are at once necessary and uncertain, and all the more disruptive. The law of

the painting is that it be done at close range, even if it is viewed from rela-

tively far away. One can back away from a thing, but it is a bad painter who

backs away from the painting he or she is working on. Or from the "thing"

for that matter: Cezanne spoke of the need to no longer see the wheat field,

to be too close to it, to lose oneself without landmarks in smooth space.

Afterward, striation can emerge: drawing, strata, the earth, "stubborn

geometry," the "measure of the world," "geological foundations," "every-

thing falls straight down" . . . The striated itself may in turn disappear in a

"catastrophe," opening the way for a new smooth space, and another stri-

ated space...

A painting is done at close range, even if it is seen from a distance. Simi-

larly, it is said that composers do not hear: they have close-range hearing,

whereas listeners hear from a distance. Even writers write with short-term

memory, whereas readers are assumed to be endowed with long-term

memory. The first aspect of the haptic, smooth space of close vision is that

its orientations, landmarks, and linkages are in continuous variation; it

operates step by step. Examples are the desert, steppe, ice, and sea, local

spaces of pure connection. Contrary to what is sometimes said, one never

sees from a distance in a space of this kind, nor does one see it from a dis-

tance; one is never "in front of," any more than one is "in" (one is "on" ...).

Orientations are not constant but change according to temporary vegeta-

tion, occupations, and precipitation. There is no visual model for points of

reference that would make them interchangeable and unite them in an

inertial class assignable to an immobile outside observer. On the contrary,

they are tied to any number of observers, who may be qualified as "mon-

ads" but are instead nomads entertaining tactile relations among them-

selves. The interlinkages do not imply an ambient space in which the

multiplicity would be immersed and which would make distances invari-

ant; rather, they are constituted according to ordered differences that give

rise to intrinsic variations in the division of a single distance.

These ques-

tions of orientation, location, and linkage enter into play in the most

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famous works of nomad art: the twisted animals have no land beneath

them; the ground constantly changes direction, as in aerial acrobatics; the

paws point in the opposite direction from the head, the hind part of the

body is turned upside down; the "monadological" points of view can be

interlinked only on a nomad space; the whole and the parts give the eye that

beholds them a function that is haptic rather than optical. This is an

animality that can be seen only by touching it with one's mind, but without

the mind becoming a finger, not even by way of the eye. (In a much cruder

fashion, the kaleidoscope has exactly the same function: to give the eye a

digital function.) Striated space, on the contrary, is defined by the require-

ments of long-distance vision: constancy of orientation, in variance of dis-

tance through an interchange of inertial points of reference, interlinkage by

immersion in an ambient milieu, constitution of a central perspective. It is

less easy to evaluate the creative potentialities of striated space, and how it

can simultaneously emerge from the smooth and give everything a whole

new impetus.

The opposition between the striated and the smooth is not simply that of

the global and the local. For in one case, the global is still relative, whereas

in the other the local is already absolute. Where there is close vision, space

is not visual, or rather the eye itself has a haptic, nonoptical function: no

line separates earth from sky, which are of the same substance; there is nei-

ther horizon nor background nor perspective nor limit nor outline or form

nor center; there is no intermediary distance, or all distance is intermedi-

ary. Like Eskimo space.

In a totally different way, in a totally different

context, Arab architecture constitutes a space that begins very near and

low, placing the light and the airy below and the solid and heavy above.

This reversal of the laws of gravity turns lack of direction and negation of

volume into constructive forces. There exists a nomadic absolute, as a local

integration moving from part to part and constituting smooth space in an

infinite succession of linkages and changes in direction. It is an absolute

that is one with becoming itself, with process. It is the absolute of passage,

which in nomad art merges with its manifestation. Here the absolute is

local, precisely because place is not delimited. If we now turn to the striated

and optical space of long-distance vision, we see that the relative global

that characterizes that space also requires the absolute, but in an entirely

different way. The absolute is now the horizon or background, in other

words, the Encompassing Element without which nothing would be global

or englobed. It is against this background that the relative outline or form

appears. The absolute itself can appear in the Encompassed, but only in a

privileged place well delimited as a center, which then functions to repel

beyond the limits anything that menaces the global integration. We can see

clearly here how smooth space subsists, but only to give rise to the striated.

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THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED □ 495

The desert, sky, or sea, the Ocean, the Unlimited, first plays the role of an

encompassing element, and tends to become a horizon: the earth is thus

surrounded, globalized, "grounded" by this element, which holds it in

immobile equilibrium and makes Form possible. Then to the extent that

the encompassing element itself appears at the center of the earth, it

assumes a second role, that of casting into the loathesome deep, the abode

of the dead, anything smooth or nonmeasured that may have remained.

The striation of the earth implies as its necessary condition this double

treatment of the smooth: on the one hand, it is carried or reduced to the

absolute state of an encompassing horizon, and on the other it is expelled

from the relative encompassed element. Thus the great imperial religions

need a smooth space like the desert, but only in order to give it a law that is

opposed to the nomos in every way, and converts the absolute.

This perhaps explains for us the ambiguity of the excellent analyses by

Riegl, Worringer, and Maldiney. They approach haptic space under the

imperial conditions of Egyptian art. They define it as the presence of a

horizon-background; the reduction of space to the plane (vertical and hori-

zontal, height and width); and the rectilinear outline enclosing individual-

ity and withdrawing it from change. Like the pyramid-form, every side a

plane surface, against the background of the immobile desert. On the other

hand, they show how in Greek art (then in Byzantine art, and up to the Ren-

aissance), an optical space was differentiated from haptic space, one merg-

ing background with form, setting up an interference between the planes,

conquering depth, working with cubic or voluminous extension, organiz-

ing perspective, and playing on relief and shadow, light and color. Thus at

the very beginning they encounter the haptic at a point of mutation, in con-

ditions under which it already serves to striate space. The optical makes

that striation tighter and more perfect, or rather tight and perfect in a dif-

ferent way (it is not associated with the same "artistic will"). Everything

occurs in a striated space that goes from empires to city-states, or evolved

empires. It is not by chance that Riegl tends to eliminate the specific fac-

tors of nomad or even barbarian art; or that Worringer, when he introduces

the idea of Gothic art in the broadest sense, relates it on the one hand to the

Germanic and Celtic migrations of the North, and on the other to the

empires of the East. But between the two were the nomads, who are reduci-

ble neither to empires they confronted nor the migrations they triggered.

The Goths themselves were nomads of the steppe, and with the Sarmatians

and Huns were an essential vector of communication between the East and

the North, a factor irreducible to either of these two dimensions.

On one

side, Egypt had its Hyksos, Asia Minor its Hittites, China its

Turco-Mongols; and on the other, the Hebrews had their Habiru, the

Germans, Celts, and Romans their Goths, the Arabs their Bedouins. The

nomads

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have a specificity that is too hastily reduced to its consequences, by includ-

ing them in the empires or counting them among the migrants, assimilat-

ing them to one or the other, denying them their own "will" to art. Again,

there is a refusal to accept that the intermediary between the East and the

North had its own absolute specificity, that the intermediary, the interval,

played exactly this substantial role. Moreover, it does not have that role in

the guise of a "will"; it only has a becoming, it invents a "becoming-artist."

When we invoke a primordial duality between the smooth and the stri-

ated, it is in order to subordinate the differences between "haptic" and

"optic," "close vision" and "distant vision" to this distinction. Hence we

will not define the haptic by the immobile background, by the plane and

the contour, because these have to do with an already mixed state in which

the haptic serves to striate, and uses its smooth components only in order

to convert them to another kind of space. The haptic function and close

vision presuppose the smooth, which has no background, plane, or con-

tour, but rather changes in direction and local linkages between parts. Con-

versely, the developed optical function is not content to take striation to a

new level of perfection, endowing it with an imaginary universal value and

scope; it is also capable of reinstating the smooth, liberating light and mod-

ulating color, restoring a kind of aerial haptic space that constitutes the

unlimited site of intersection of the planes.

In short, the smooth and the

striated must be defined in themselves before the relative distinctions

between haptic and optical, near and distant, can be derived.

This is where a third couple enters in: "abstract line-concrete line" (in

addition to "haptic-optical," "close-distant"). It is Worringer who

accorded fundamental importance to the abstract line, seeing it as the very

beginning of art or the first expression of an artistic will. Art as abstract

machine. Once again, it will doubtless be our inclination to voice in

advance the same objections: for Worringer, the abstract line seems to

make its first appearance in the crystalline or geometrical imperial Egyp-

tian form, the most rectilinear of forms possible. It is only afterward that it

assumes a particular avatar, constituting the "Gothic or Northern line"

understood very broadly.

For us, on the other hand, the abstract line is

fundamentally "Gothic," or rather, nomadic, not rectilinear. Conse-

quently, we do not understand the aesthetic motivation for the abstract line

in the same way, or its identity with the beginning of art. Whereas the recti-

linear (or "regularly" rounded) Egyptian line is negatively motivated by

anxiety in the face of all that passes, flows, or varies, and erects the con-

stancy and eternity of an In-Itself, the nomad line is abstract in an entirely

different sense, precisely because it has a multiple orientation and passes
between points, figures, and contours: it is positively motivated by the

smooth space it draws, not by any striation it might perform to ward off

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THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED □ 497

anxiety and subordinate the smooth. The abstract line is the affect of

smooth spaces, not a feeling of anxiety that calls forth striation. Further-

more, although it is true that art begins only with the abstract line, the rea-

son is not, as Worringer says, that the rectilinear is the first means of

breaking with the nonaesthetic imitation of nature upon which the prehis-

toric, savage, and childish supposedly depend, lacking, as he thinks they

do, a "will to art." On the contrary, if prehistoric art is fully art it is precisely

because it manipulates the abstract, though nonrectilinear, line: "Primi-

tive art begins with the abstract, and even the prefigurative.... Art is

abstract from the outset, and at its origin could not have been otherwise."

effect, the line is all the more abstract when writing is absent, either

because it has yet to develop or only exists outside or alongside. When writ-

ing takes charge of abstraction, as it does in empires, the line, already

downgraded, necessarily tends to become concrete, even figurative. Chil-

dren forget how to draw. But in the absence of writing, or when peoples

have no need for a writing system of their own because theirs is borrowed

from more or less nearby empires (as was the case for the nomads), the line

is necessarily abstract; it is necessarily invested with all the power of

abstraction, which finds no other outlet. That is why we believe that the dif-

ferent major types of imperial lines—the Egyptian rectilinear line, the

Assyrian (or Greek) organic line, the supraphenomenal, encompassing

Chinese line—convert the abstract line, rend it from its smooth space, and

accord it concrete values. Still, it can be argued that these imperial lines are

contemporaneous with the abstract line; the abstract line is no less at the

"beginning," inasmuch as it is a pole always presupposed by any line capa-

ble of constituting another pole. The abstract line is at the beginning as

much because of its historical abstraction as its prehistoric dating. It is

therefore a part of the originality or irreducibility of nomad art, even when

there is reciprocal interaction, influence, and confrontation with the

imperial lines of sedentary art.

The abstract is not directly opposed to the figurative. The figurative as

such is not inherent to any "will to art." In fact, we may oppose a figurative

line in art to one that is not. The figurative, or imitation and representa-

tion, is a consequence, a result of certain characteristics of the line when it

assumes a given form. We must therefore define those characteristics first.

Take a system in which transversals are subordinated to diagonals, diago-

nals to horizontals and verticals, and horizontals and verticals to points

(even when there are virtual). A system of this kind, which is rectilinear or

unilinear regardless of the number of lines, expresses the formal conditions

under which a space is striated and the line describes a contour. Such a line

is inherently, formally, representative in itself, even if it does not represent

anything. On the other hand, a line that delimits nothing, that describes no

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contour, that no longer goes from one point to another but instead passes

between points, that is always declining from the horizontal and the verti-

cal and deviating from the diagonal, that is constantly changing direction,

a mutant line of this kind that is without outside or inside, form or back-

ground, beginning or end and that is as alive as a continuous variation—

such a line is truly an abstract line, and describes a smooth space. It is not

inexpressive. Yet is true that it does not constitute a stable and symmetrical
form of expression grounded in a resonance of points and a conjunction of

lines. It is nevertheless accompanied by material traits of expression, the

effects of which multiply step by step. This is what Worringer means when

he says that the Gothic line (for us, the nomadic line invested with abstrac-

tion) has the power of expression and not of form, that it has repetition as a

power, not symmetry as form. Indeed, it is through symmetry that rectilin-

ear systems limit repetition, preventing infinite progression and maintain-

ing the organic domination of a central point with radiating lines, as in

reflected or star-shaped figures. It is free action, however, which by its

essence unleashes the power of repetition as a machinic force that multi-

plies its effect and pursues an infinite movement. Free action proceeds by

disjunction and decentering, or at least by peripheral movement: dis-

jointed polythetism instead of symmetrical antithetism.

Traits of expres-

sion describing a smooth space and connecting with a matter-flow thus

should not be confused with striae that convert space and make it a form of

expression that grids and organizes matter.

Worringer's finest pages are those in which he contrasts the abstract

with the organic. The organic does not designate something represented,

but above all the form of representation, and even the feeling that unites

representation with a subject {Einfuhlung, "empathy"). "Formal processes

occur within the work of art which correspond to the natural organic ten-

dencies in man."

But the rectilinear, the geometrical, cannot be opposed

to the organic in this sense. The Greek organic line, which subordinates

volume and spatiality, takes over from the Egyptian geometrical line,

which reduced them to the plane. The organic, with its symmetry and con-

tours inside and outside, still refers to the rectilinear coordinates of a stri-

ated space. The organic body is prolonged by straight lines that attach it to

what lies in the distance. Hence the primacy of human beings, or of the

face: We are this form of expression itself, simultaneously the supreme

organism and the relation of all organisms to metric space in general. The

abstract, on the contrary, begins only with what Worringer presents as the

"Gothic" avatar. It is this nomadic line that he says is mechanical, but in

free action and swirling; it is inorganic, yet alive, and all the more alive for

being inorganic. It is distinguished both from the geometrical and the

organic. It raises "mechanical" relations to the level of intuition. Heads

1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED □ 499

(even a human being's when it is not a face) unravel and coil into ribbons in

a continuous process; mouths curl in spirals. Hair, clothes. . . This stream-

ing, spiraling, zigzagging, snaking, feverish line of variation liberates a

power of life that human beings had rectified and organisms had confined,

and which matter now expresses as the trait, flow, or impulse traversing it.

If everything is alive, it is not because everything is organic or organized

but, on the contrary, because the organism is a diversion of life. In short,

the life in question is inorganic, germinal, and intensive, a powerful life

without organs, a Body that is all the more alive for having no organs,

everything that passes between organisms ("once the natural barriers of

organic movement have been overthrown, there are no more limits").

Many authors have wished to establish a kind of duality in nomad art

between the ornamental abstract line and animal motifs, or more subtly,

between the speed with which the line integrates and carries expressive

traits, and the slowness or fixity of the animal matter traversed, between a

line of flight without beginning or end and an almost immobile swirling.

But in the end everyone agrees that it is a question of a single will, or a single

becoming.

This is not because the abstract engenders organic motifs, by

chance or by association. Rather, it is precisely because pure animality is

experienced as inorganic, or supraorganic, that it can combine so well with

abstraction, and even combine the slowness or heaviness of a matter with

the extreme speed of a line that has become entirely spiritual. The slowness

belongs to the same world as the extreme speed: relations of speed and

slowness between elements, which surpass in every way the movement of

an organic form and the determination of organs. The line escapes geome-

try by a fugitive mobility at the same time as life tears itself free from the

organic by a permutating, stationary whirlwind. This vital force specific to

the Abstraction is what draws smooth space. The abstract line is the affect

of smooth space, just as organic representation was the feeling presiding

over striated space. The haptic-optical, near-distant distinctions must be

subordinated to the distinction between the abstract line and the organic

line; they must find their principle in a general confrontation of spaces.

The abstract line cannot be defined as geometrical and rectilinear. What

then should be termed abstract in modern art? A line of variable direction

that describes no contour and delimits no form . . ,

Do not multiply models. We are well aware that there are many others: a

ludic model, which would compare games according to their type of space

and found game theory on different principles (for example, the smooth

space of Go versus the striated space of chess); and a noological model con-

cerned not with thought contents (ideology) but with the form, manner or

mode, and function of thought, according to the mental space it draws and

502 □ CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES

Strata, stratification

The strata are phenomena of thickening on the Body of the earth, 3

simultaneously molecular and molar: accumulations, coagulations,

sedimentations, foldings. They are Belts, Pincers, or Articulations.

Summarily and traditionally, we distinguish three major strata:

physicochemical, organic, and anthropomorphic (or "alloplastic").

Each stratum, or articulation, consists of coded milieus and formed

substances. Forms and substances, codes and milieus are not really

distinct. They are the abstract components of every articulation.

A stratum obviously presents very diverse forms and substances, a

variety of codes and milieus. It thus possesses both different formal

Types of organization and different substantial Modes of develop-

ment, which divide it into parastrata and epistrata, for example, the

divisions of the organic stratum. The epistrata and parastrata subdi-

viding a stratum can be considered strata themselves (so that the list

is never exhaustive). A given stratum retains a unity of composition

in spite of the diversity in its organization and development. The

unity of composition relates to formal traits common to all of the

forms or codes of a stratum, and to substantial elements, materials

common to all of the stratum's substances or milieus.

The strata are extremely mobile. One stratum is always capable

of serving as the substratum of another, or of colliding with

another, independently of any evolutionary order. Above all,

be-ween two strata or between two stratic divisions, there are
inter-stratic phenomena: transcodings and passages between

milieus, intermixings. Rhythms pertain to these interstratic

movements, which are also acts of stratification. Stratification is like

the creation of the world from chaos, a continual, renewed creation.

And the strata constitute the Judgment of God. Classical artists are

like God, they make the world by organizing forms and substances,

codes and milieus, and rhythms.

Articulation, which is constitutive of a stratum, is always a double

articulation (double pincer). What is articulated is a content and an
expression. Whereas form and substance are not really distinct, con-

tent and expression are. Hjelmslev's net is applicable to the strata:

articulation of content and articulation of expression, with content

and expression each possessing its own form and substance. Between

them, between content and expression, there is neither a correspon-

dence nor a cause-effect relation nor a signified-signifier relation:

CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES D 503

there is real distinction, reciprocal presupposition, and only

isomor-phy. But content and expression are not distinguished from

each other in the same fashion on each stratum: the distribution of

content and expression is not the same on the three major strata

(there is, for example, a "linearization" of expression on the organic

stratum, and a "superlinearity" of the anthropomorphic strata). That

is why the molar and the molecular have very different

combinations depending on the stratum considered.

What movement, what impulse, sweeps us outside the strata

and (metastratd)"] Of course, there is no reason to think that all matter is

4 confined to the physicochemical strata: there exists a submolecular,

unformed Matter. Similarly, not all Life is confined to the organic

strata: rather, the organism is that which life sets against itself in order

to limit itself, and there is a life all the more intense, all the more pow

erful for being anorganic. There are also nonhuman Becomings of

human beings that overspill the anthropomorphic strata in all direc

tions. But how can we reach this "plane," or rather how can we con

struct it, and how can we draw the "line" leading us there? For outside

the strata or in the absence of strata we no longer have forms or sub

stances, organization or development, content or expression. We are

disarticulated; we no longer even seem to be sustained by rhythms.

How could unformed matter, anorganic life, nonhuman becoming be

anything but chaos pure and simple? Every undertaking of

destratification (for example, going beyond the organism, plunging

into a becoming) must therefore observe concrete rules of extreme

6 caution: a too-sudden destratification may be suicidal, or turn can-

cerous. In other words, it will sometimes end in chaos, the void and

destruction, and sometimes lock us back into the strata, which

become more rigid still, losing their degrees of diversity, differentia-

tion, and mobility.

Assemblages

Assemblages are already different from strata. They are produced in 11

the strata, but operate in zones where milieus become decoded: they

begin by extracting a territory from the milieus. Every assemblage is

basically territorial. The first concrete rule for assemblages is to dis-

cover what territoriality they envelop, for there always is one: in their

trash can or on their bench, Beckett's characters stake out a territory.

Discover the territorial assemblages of someone, human or animal:

504 □

CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES

"home." The territory is made of decoded fragments of all kinds,

which are borrowed from the milieus but then assume the value of

"properties": even rhythms take on a new meaning (refrains). The ter-

ritory makes the assemblage. The territory is more than the organism

and the milieu, and the relation between the two; that is why the

assemblage goes beyond mere "behavior" (hence the importance of

the relative distinction between territorial animals and milieu

animals).

Inasmuch as they are territorial, assemblages still belong to the

strata. At least they pertain to them in one of their aspects, and it is

under this aspect that we distinguish in every assemblage content 4

from expression. It is necessary to ascertain the content and the

expression of each assemblage, to evaluate their real distinction, their

reciprocal presupposition, their piecemeal insertions. The reason that

the assemblage is not confined to the strata is that expression in it

becomes a semiotic system, a regime of signs, and content becomes a
pragmatic system, actions and passions. This is the double articulation

face-hand, gesture-word, and the reciprocal presupposition between the

two. This is the first division of every assemblage: it is simultaneously

and inseparably a machinic assemblage and an assemblage of

enunciation. In each case, it is necessary to ascertain both what is said

and what is done. There is a new relation between content and

expression that was not yet present in the strata: the statements or

expressions express incorporeal transformations that are "attributed"

as such (properties) to bodies or contents. In the strata, expressions do

not form signs, nor contents pragmata, so this autonomous zone of

incorporeal transformations expressed by the former and attributed to

the latter does not appear. Of course, regimes of signs develop only in

the alloplastic or anthropomorphic strata (including territorialized

animals). But this does not mean that they do not permeate all of the

strata, and overspill each of them. Assemblages belong to the strata to

the extent that the distinction between content and expression still

holds for them. We may also think of regimes of signs and pragmatic

systems as strata in their own right, in the broad sense previously

mentioned. But because the content-expression distinction assumes a

new figure, we are already in a different element than that of the strata

in the narrow sense.

The assemblage is also divided along another axis. Its territoriality

(content and expression included) is only a first aspect; the other

aspect is constituted by lines of deterritorialization that cut across it

and carry it away. These lines are very diverse: some open the territor-

ial assemblage onto other assemblages (for example, the territorial

CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES □ 505

refrain of the animal becomes a courtship or group refrain). Others

operate directly upon the territoriality of the assemblage, and open it

onto a land that is eccentric, immemorial, or yet to come (for example,

the game of territory and the earth in the lied, or in the romantic 11 artist

in general). Still others open assemblages onto abstract and cos-and mic

machines that they effectuate. The territoriality of the assem-4 blage

originates in a certain decoding of milieus, and is just as necessarily

extended by lines of deterritorialization. The territory is just as

inseparable from deterritorialization as the code from decoding.

Following these lines, the assemblage no longer presents an expression

distinct from content, only unformed matters, destrati-fied forces, and

functions. The concrete rules of assemblage thus operate along these two

axes: On the one hand, what is the territoriality of the assemblage, what

is the regime of signs and the pragmatic system? On the other hand,

what are the cutting edges of deterritorialization, and what abstract

machines do they effectuate? The assemblage is tetravalent: (1) content

and expression; (2) territoriality and deterritorialization. That is why

there were four aspects in the privileged example of Kafka's

assemblages.

Rhizome

Not only strata, assemblages are complexes of lines. We can identify a

first state of the line, or a first kind of line: the line is subordinated to

the point; the diagonal is subordinated to the horizontal and vertical;

the line forms a contour, whether figurative or not; the space it consti-

tutes is one of striation; the countable multiplicity it constitutes

remains subordinated to the One in an always superior or supplemen-

tary dimension. Lines of this type are molar, and form a segmentary,

circular, binary, arborescent system.

The second kind is very different, molecular and of the "rhizome"

type. The diagonal frees itself, breaks or twists. The line no longer

forms a contour, and instead passes between things, between points. It

belongs to a smooth space. It draws a plane that has no more dimen-

sions than that which crosses it; therefore the multiplicity it consti-

tutes is no longer subordinated to the One, but takes on a consistency

of its own. These are multiplicities of masses or packs, not of classes;

anomalous and nomadic multiplicities, not normal or legal ones;

multiplicities of becoming, or transformational multiplicities, not

countable elements and ordered relations; fuzzy, not exact aggre-

and

and 14

506 D

CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES

gates, etc. At the level of pathos, these multiplicities are expressed by

psychosis and especially schizophrenia. At the level of pragmatics,

they are utilized by sorcery. At the level of theory, the status of multi-

plicities is correlative to that of spaces, and vice versa: smooth spaces

of the type desert, steppe, or sea are not without people; they are not

depopulated but rather are populated by multiplicities of this second

kind (mathematics and music have gone quite far in the elaboration

of this theory of multiplicities).

It is not enough, however, to replace the opposition between the

One and the multiple with a distinction between types of multiplici-

9 ties. For the distinction between the two types does not preclude their

immanence to each other, each "issuing" from the other after its fash-

ion. It is not so much that some multiplicities are arborescent and

others not, but that there is an arborification of multiplicities. That is

what happens when the black holes scattered along a rhizome begin

to resonate together, or when the stems form segments that striate

space in all directions, rendering it comparable, divisible, homoge-

12 neous (as we saw in particular in the case of the Face). That is also

what happens when "mass" movements or molecular flows conjugate

at points of accumulation or stoppage that segment and rectify them.

But conversely, and without symmetry, the stems of the rhizome are

always taking leave of the trees, the masses and flows are constantly

escaping, inventing connections that jump from tree to tree and

uproot them: a whole smoothing of space, which in turn reacts back

upon striated space. Even, and especially, territories are perturbed by

these deep movements. Or language: the trees of language are shaken

by buddings and rhizomes. So that rhizome lines oscillate between

8 tree lines that segment and even stratify them, and lines of flight or

and rupture that carry them away.

9 We are therefore made of three lines, but each kind of line has its

dangers. Not only the segmented lines that cleave us, and impose

upon us the striations of a homogeneous space, but also the molecular

lines, already ferrying their micro-black holes, and finally the lines of

flight themselves, which always risk abandoning their creative poten

tialities and turning into a line of death, being turned into a line of

destruction pure and simple (fascism).

Plane of Consistency, Body without Organs

The plane of consistency or of composition (planomenon) is opposed

CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES □ 507

10 to the plane of organization and development. Organization and

development concern form and substance: at once the development

of form and the formation of substance or a subject. But the plane of

consistency knows nothing of substance and form: haecceities, which

are inscribed on this plane, are precisely modes of individuation pro-

ceeding neither by form nor by the subject. The plane consists

abstractly, but really, in relations of speed and slowness between

unformed elements, and in compositions of corresponding intensive

affects (the "longitude" and "latitude" of the plane). In another sense,

consistency concretely ties together heterogeneous, disparate ele-

11 ments as such: it assures the consolidation of fuzzy aggregates, in

other words, multiplicities of the rhizome type. In effect, consistency,

proceeding by consolidation, acts necessarily in the middle, by the

middle, and stands opposed to all planes of principle or finality.

Spinoza, Holderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche are the surveyors of such a

plane of consistency. Never unifications, never totalizations, but

rather consistencies or consolidations.

10 Inscribed on the plane of consistency are haecceities, events, incor-

poreal transformations that are apprehended in themselves; nomadic
essences, vague yet rigorous; continuums of intensities or continuous

4, 6 variations, which go beyond constants and variables; becomings,

1, 9 which have neither culmination nor subject, but draw one another

into zones of proximity or undecidability; smooth spaces, composed

from within striated space. We will say that a body without organs, or

6 bodies without organs (plateaus) comes into play in individuation by

and haecceity, in the production of intensities beginning at a degree zero,

10 in the matter of variation, in the medium of becoming or transforma-

tion, and in the smoothing of space. A powerful nonorganic life that

14 escapes the strata, cuts across assemblages, and draws an abstract line

without contour, a line of nomad art and itinerant metallurgy.

Does the plane of consistency constitute the body without organs,

or does the body without organs compose the plane? Are the Body

without Organs and the Plane the same thing? In any event, composer

and composed have the same power: the line does not have a dimen-

sion superior to that of the point, nor the surface to that of the line,

10 nor the volume to that of the surface, but always an anexact, frac-and

tional number of dimensions that constantly increase or decrease

14 with the number of its parts. The plane sections multiplicities of vari-

able dimensions. The question is, therefore, the mode of connection

between the different parts of the plane: To what extent do the bodies

without organs interconnect? How are the continuums of intensity

extended? What is the order of the transformational series? What are

508 □

CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES

these alogical linkages always effected in the middle, through which

the plane is constructed piece by piece in ascending or descending

fractional order? The plane is like a row of doors. And the concrete

rules for the construction of the plane obtain to the extent that they

exercise a selective role. It is the plane, in other words, the mode of

connection, that provides the means of eliminating the empty and

cancerous bodies that rival the body without organs, of rejecting the

homogeneous surfaces that overlay smooth space, and neutralizing

the lines of death and destruction that divert the line of flight. What

is retained and preserved, therefore created, what consists, is only
that which increases the number of connections at each level of

division or composition, thus in descending as well as ascending

order (that which is cannot be divided without changing in nature, or

enter into a larger composition without requiring a new criterion of

comparison...).

Deterritorialization

The function of deterritorialization: D is the movement by which 5

"one" leaves the territory. It is the operation of the line of flight. There

are very different cases. D may be overlaid by a compensatory

reterritorialization obstructing the line of flight: D is then said to be
negative. Anything can serve as a reterritorialization, in other words,

"stand for" the lost territory; one can reterritorialize on a being, an

object, a book, an apparatus or system.. . For example, it is inaccurate

to say that the State apparatus is territorial: it in fact performs a D, but

one immediately overlaid by reterritorializations on property, work,

and money (clearly, that landowner ship, public or private, is not

territorial but reterritorializing). Among regimes of signs, the
signifying regime certainly attains a high level of D; but because it

simultaneously sets up a whole system of reterritorializations on the

signified, and on the signifier itself, it blocks the line of flight, allowing

only a negative D to persist. Another case is when D becomes

positive—in other words, when it prevails over the reterritorializations,

which play only a secondary role—but nevertheless remains relative

because the line of flight it draws is segmented, is divided into

successive "proceedings," sinks into black holes, or even ends up in a

generalized black hole (catastrophe). This is the case of the regime of
subjective signs, with its passional and consciousness-related D, which

is positive but only in

CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES □ 509

a relative sense. It will be noted immediately that these two major

forms of D are not in a simple evolutionary relation to each other:

the second may break away from the first, or it may lead into it (nota-

bly when the segmentations of converging lines of flight bring an

overall reterritorialization or one benefiting a particular segment,

thus arresting the movement of escape). There are all kinds of mixed

figures, assuming highly varied forms of D.

Is there absolute D, and what does "absolute" mean? We must

first have a better understanding of the relations between D, the

territory, reterritorialization, and the earth. To begin with, the terri-

tory itself is inseparable from vectors of deterritorialization work-

9 ing it from within: either because the territoriality is supple and

and "marginal," in other words, itinerant, or because the territorial

13 assemblage itself opens onto and is carried off by other types of

11 assemblages. Second, D is in turn inseparable from correlative

reterritorializations. D is never simple, but always multiple and

composite: not only because it participates in various forms at the same

time, but also because it converges distinct speeds and movements on

the basis of which one may assign at a given moment a

"deterritorialized element" and a "deterritorializing element." Now,

reterritorialization as an original operation does not express a return to

the territory, but rather these differential relations inter-7 nal to D itself,

this multiplicity internal to the line of flight (cf. "The-and orems of D").

Finally, the earth is not at all the opposite of D: This

10 can already be seen in the mystery of the "natal," in which the earth

as ardent, eccentric, or intense focal point is outside the territory

11 and exists only in the movement of D. More than that, the earth, the

glacial, is Deterritorialization par excellence: that is why it belongs

3 to the Cosmos, and presents itself as the material through which

human beings tap cosmic forces. We could say that the earth, as

deterritorialized, is itself the strict correlate of D. To the point that

D can be called the creator of the earth—of a new land, a universe,

not just a reterritorialization.

This is the meaning of "absolute." The absolute expresses nothing

transcendent or undifferentiated. It does not even express a quantity

that would exceed all given (relative) quantities. It expresses only a

type of movement qualitatively different from relative movement. A

movement is absolute when, whatever its quantity and speed, it

7 relates "a" body considered as multiple to a smooth space that it and

occupies in the manner of a vortex. A movement is relative, whatever

14 its quantity and speed, when it relates a body considered as One to a

striated space through which it moves, and which it measures with

510 □

CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES

straight lines, if only virtual. D is negative or relative (yet already

effective) when it conforms to the second case and operates either by

principal reterritorializations that obstruct the lines of flight, or by

secondary reterritorializations that segment and work to curtail

them. D is absolute when it conforms to the first case and brings

about the creation of a new earth, in other words, when it connects

lines of flight, raises them to the power of an abstract vital line, or

draws a plane of consistency. Now what complicates everything is

that this absolute D necessarily proceeds by way of relative D, pre-

cisely because it is not transcendent. Conversely, relative or negative

D itself requires an absolute for its operation: it makes the absolute

something "encompassing," something totalizing that overcodes the

earth and then conjugates lines of flight in order to stop them, destroy

them—rather than connecting them in order to create (it is in this

sense that we have opposed conjunction to connection, although we

have often treated them as synonyms from a very general point of

view). Thus there is a limitative absolute already at work in properly

9 negative, or even relative, D's. Above all, at this turning point the

and lines of flight are not only obstructed or segmented but turn into lines

14 of destruction or death. For the stakes here are indeed the negative

and the positive in the absolute: the earth girded, encompassed,

11 overcoded, conjugated as the object of a mortuary and suicidal

organization surrounding it on all sides, or the earth consolidated,

connected with the Cosmos, brought into the Cosmos following lines

of creation that cut across it as so many becomings (Nietzsche's

expression: Let the earth become lightness . . .). There are thus at

least four forms of D that confront and combine, and must be distin-

guished from one another following concrete rules.

Abstract Machines (Diagram and Phylum)

There is no abstract machine, or machines, in the sense of a Platonic

Idea, transcendent, universal, eternal. Abstract machines operate within

concrete assemblages: They are defined by the fourth aspect of

assemblages, in other words, the cutting edges of decoding and 11

deterritorialization. They draw these cutting edges. Therefore they

make the territorial assemblage open onto something else, assemblages

of another type, the molecular, the cosmic; they constitute becomings.

Thus they are always singular and immanent. Contrary to the strata, and

the assemblages considered under their other aspects,

CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES □ 511

abstract machines know nothing of forms and substances. This is what

makes them abstract, and also defines the concept of the machine in

the strict sense. They surpass any kind of mechanics. They are

opposed to the abstract in the ordinary sense. Abstract machines

consist of unformed matters and nonformal functions. Every abstract

machine is a consolidated aggregate of matters-5 functions {phylum

and diagram). This is evident on a technological "plane": such a plane

is not made up simply of formed substances (aluminum, plastic,

electric wire, etc.) or organizing forms (program, prototypes, etc.), but

of a composite of unformed matters exhibiting only degrees of

intensity (resistance, conductivity, heating, stretching, speed or delay,

induction, transduction . . .) and diagrammatic functions exhibiting

only differential equations or, more generally, "tensors." Of course,

within the dimensions of the assemblage, the abstract machine, or

machines, is effectuated in forms and substances, in varying states of

freedom. But the abstract machine must first have composed itself, and

have simultaneously composed a plane of consistency. Abstract,

singular, and creative, here and now, real yet nonconcrete, actual yet

noneffectuated—that is why abstract machines are dated and named

(the Einstein abstract machine, the Webern abstract machine, but also

the Galileo, the Bach, or the Beethoven, etc.). Not that they refer to

people or to effectuating moments; on the contrary, it is the names and

dates that refer to the singularities of the machines, and to what they

effectuate.

But if abstract machines know nothing of form and substance,

what happens to the other determination of strata, or even of

assemblages—content and expression? In a certain sense, it could be

said that this distinction is also irrelevant to the abstract machine,

3 precisely because it no longer has the forms and substances the dis

tinction requires. The plane of consistency is a plane of continuous

variation; each abstract machine can be considered a "plateau" of

variation that places variables of content and expression in continu

ity. Content and expression thus attain their highest level of relativ

ity, becoming "functives of one and the same function" or materials

of a single matter [see 4, "November 20, 1923: Postulates of Linguis

tics," note 21—Trans.]. But in another sense, it could be said that the

4 distinction subsists, and is even recreated, on the level oi traits: there

and are traits of content (unformed matters or intensities) and traits of

5 expression (nonformal functions or tensors). Here, the distinction

has become entirely displaced, or even a different distinction, since it

now concerns cutting edges of deterritorialization. Absolute deter-

ritorialization implies a "deterritorializing element" and a "deterri-

512 D

CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES

torialized element," one of which in each case is allocated to expression,

the other to content, or vice versa, but always in such a way as to convey a

relative distinction between the two. Thus both content and expression are

necessarily affected by continuous variation, but it still assigns them two

dissymmetrical roles as elements of a single becoming, or as quanta of a

single flow. That is why it is impossible to define a continuous variation

that would not take in both the content and the expression, rendering

them indiscernible, while simultaneously proceeding by one or the other,

determining the two mobile and relative poles of that which has become

indiscernible. For this reason, one must define both traits or intensities of

content and traits or ten-1, 2 sors of expression (indefinite article, proper
name, infinitive, and 4, 10 date), which take turns leading one another

across the plane of consistency. Unformed matter, the phylum, is not

dead, brute, homo-12 geneous matter, but a matter-movement bearing

singularities or haecceities, qualities, and even operations (itinerant

technological lineages); and the nonformal function, the diagram, is not

an inexpressive metalanguage lacking a syntax, but an

expressivity-movement always bearing a foreign tongue within each

language and 4 nonlinguistic categories within language as a whole

(nomad poetic lineages). One writes, then, on the same level as the real

of an unformed matter, at the same time as that matter traverses and

extends all of nonformal language: a becoming-animal like Kafka's

10 mouse [p. 243], Hofmannsthal's rats [p. 240], Moritz's calves [p.

240]? A revolutionary machine, all the more abstract for being real. A

regime that no longer operates by the signifier or the subjective.

That covers singular and immanent abstract machines. What we

have said does not preclude the possibility of "the" abstract machine

serving as a transcendent model, under very particular conditions.

This time the concrete assemblages are related to an abstract idea of

the Machine and, depending on how they effectuate it, are assigned

coefficients taking into account their potentialities, their creativity.

The coefficients that "quantify" assemblages bear on the varying

assemblage components (territory, deterritorialization,

reterritori-alization, earth, Cosmos), the various entangled lines

constituting the "map" of an assemblage (molar lines, molecular

lines, lines of flight), and the different relations-between the

assemblage and the plane of consistency (phylum and diagram). For

example, the "grass stem" component may have different

coefficients in assemblages of

11 animal species that are nevertheless closely related [p. 324-25]. As a

general rule, an assemblage is all the closer to the abstract machine

the more lines without contour passing between things it has, and the

CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES □ 513

4 more it enjoys a power of metamorphosis (transformation and

trans-and substantiation) corresponding to the matter-function: cf. The
Waves 10 machine [p. 252].

We have considered in particular two great alloplastic and anthro-

pomorphic assemblages, the war machine and the State apparatus.

These two assemblages not only differ in nature but are quantifiable

in relation to "the" abstract machine in different ways. They do not

have the same relation to the phylum, the diagram; they do not have

the same lines, or the same components. This analysis of the two

12 assemblages and their coefficients demonstrates that the war ma-

and chine does not in itself have war for its object, but necessarily adopts it

13 as its object when it allows itself to be appropriated by the State appa

ratus. At this very precise point, the line of flight and the abstract vital

line it effectuates turn into a line of death and destruction. Hence the

name war "machine," which is much closer to the abstract machine

than is the State apparatus, which divests the war machine of its

power of metamorphosis. Writing and music can be war machines.

The more an assemblage opens and multiplies connections and draws

a plane of consistency with its quantifiers of intensities and of consol-

1, 4 idation, the closer it is to the living abstract machine. But it strays

5, 9 from it to the extent that it replaces creative connections with con-

12 junctions causing blockages (axiomatics), organizations forming

and strata (stratometers), reterritorializations forming black holes

14 (segmentometers), and conversions into lines of death (deleometers).

Thus there is a whole process of selection of assemblages according to

their ability to draw a plane of consistency with an increasing number

of connections. Schizoanalysis is not only a qualitative analysis of

abstract machines in relation to the assemblages, but also a quantita

tive analysis of the assemblages in relation to a presumably pure

abstract machine.

There is one last point of view, that of typological analysis. For

there exist general types of abstract machines. The abstract machine or

machines of the plane of consistency do not exhaust or dominate the

entirety of the operations that constitute the strata and even the

assemblages. The strata "take" on the plane of consistency itself,

forming areas of thickening, coagulations, and belts organized and

developing along the axes of another plane (substance-form, content-3

expression). This means that each stratum has a unity of consistency

or of composition relating above all to substantial elements and formal

traits, and testifying to the existence of a properly stratic abstract

machine presiding over this other plane. And there is a third type: on

the alloplastic strata, which are particularly propitious for the assem-

514 □ CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES

blages, there arise abstract machines that compensate for deterritori-9

alizations with reterritorializations, and especially for decodings with

overcodings or overcoding equivalents. We have seen in particular that if

abstract machines open assemblages they also close them. 4, 7 An

order-word machine overcodes language, a faciality machine and

overcodes the body and even the head, a machine of enslavement 8

overcodes or axiomatizes the earth: these are in no way illusions, but real

machinic effects. We can no longer place the assemblages on a

quantitative scale measuring how close or far they are from the plane of

consistency. There are different types of abstract machines that overlap

in their operations and qualify the assemblages: abstract machines of

consistency, singular and mutant, with multiplied connections; abstract

machines of stratification that surround the plane 5 of consistency

with another plane; and axiomatic or overcoding and abstract machines

that perform totalizations, homogenizations, con-13 junctions of closure.

Every abstract machine is linked to other abstract machines, not only

because they are inseparably political, economic, scientific, artistic,

ecological, cosmic—perceptive, affective, active, thinking, physical, and

semiotic—but because their various types are as intertwined as their

operations are convergent. Mechanosphere.

□

Notes

Translator's Foreword

1. Gilles Deleuze, in Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion, 1977;

forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press), p. 10.

2. Gilles Deleuze, interview with Catherine Clement, L'Arc, no. 49 (revised ed., 1980),

p. 99.

3. Gilles Deleuze, "Nomad Thought," in The New Nietzsche, ed. Donald B. Allison

(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), p. 148. Semiotext(e), Nietzsche's Return 3,1 (1978),

p. 20.

4. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 20. On the relationship between philosophy and

the State, see also pp. 351-473 of the present work. Deleuze develops an extended critique of

rationalist philosophy in Difference et repetition (Paris: PUF, 1968); see especially, "LTmage

de la pensee," pp. 169-217.

5. Deleuze, "I Have Nothing to Admit," trans. Janis Forman, Semiotext(e),

Anti-Oedipus 2, 3 (1977), p. 12 (translation modified).

6. "What I detested more than anything else was Hegelianism and the Dialectic" (ibid).

7. Ibid.

8. See Deleuze's discussion with Michel Foucault, "Intellectuals and Power," in

Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell

University Press, 1977), pp. 205-217.

9. Deleuze, "I Have Nothing to Admit," p. 113.

10. Felix Guattari, "Sur les rapports infirmiers-medecins" (1955), in Psychanalyse et

transversalite (Paris: Maspero, 1972), p. 11.

11. Guattari, Psychanalyse et transversalite, pp. 40, 173n, 288-289. The journal Re-

cherches, of which Guattari was an editor, was the mouthpiece of the institutional analysis

movement.

12. Uneasy because Guattari believed that Laing's communitarian solution reconsti-

tuted an extended Oedipal family (La Revolution moleculaire, [Paris: Editions Recherches,

517

518 D NOTES TO PP. xi-10

1977], p. 121), and because he was critical of Basaglia's assimilation of mental illness and
social alienation and his rejection of any kind of institutions for the insane (Psychanalyse et
transversalite, p. 264).

13. In 1973, Guattari was tried and fined for committing an "outrage to public decency"

by publishing an issue ofRecherches on homosexuality. All copies were ordered destroyed (La
Revolution moleculaire, p. 1 lOn).

14. Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1983).

15. La Revolution moleculaire, p. 144. The disintegration of the Left into dogmatic

"groupuscules" and the amoeba-like proliferation of Lacanian schools based on personality
cults confirmed the charge of bureaucratism but belied the potency of the mix. Guattari him-
self began his political life in the early 1950s with stormy attempts at membership in two
Trotskyist splinter parties (Psychanalyse et transversalite, pp. 268-271).

16. Difference et repetition, pp. 49-55, 337-349.
17. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans.

Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984),
pp. 32-33.

18.  Jurgen Habermas's notion of "consensus" is the updated, late-modern version.
19.  Interview with Gilles Deleuze, Liberation, October 23, 1980, p. 16.
20.  See Foucault's essay on Blanchot, often quoted by Deleuze: "The Thought from Out-

side," in Foucault/Blanchot, trans. Brian Massumi, Maurice Blanchot, and Michel Foucault
(New York: Zone Books, 1987).

21. Deleuze's books on cinema (Cinema I: The Movement-Image [Minneapolis: Univer-

sity of Minnesota Press, 1986], and Cinema II: The Time-Image [forthcoming from Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press]) and on painting (Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation [Paris: Ed.
de la Difference, 1981 ]) are not meant as exercises in philosophical expansionism. Their proj-
ect is not to bring these arts to philosophy, but to bring out the philosophy already in them.

22. The terms "smooth space" and "striated space" were in fact coined by Pierre Boulez.

See p. 361-62 of the present work and note 20.

23.  Interview with Gilles Deleuze, Liberation, October 23, 1980, p. 17.
24.  See page 158 of the present work and note.
25.  On style in literature, see Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New

York: Braziller, 1972), pp. 142-150.

26. Deleuze and Foucault, "Intellectuals and Power," p. 208.

1. Introduction: Rhizome

1. [

TRANS

U. Weinreich, W. Labov, and M. Herzog, "Empirical Foundations for a The-

ory of Language," in W. Lehmann and Y. Malkeiel, eds., Directions for Historical Linguistics

(1968), p. 125; cited by Francoise Robert, "Aspects sociaux du changement dans une

grammaire generative," Langages, no. 32 (December 1973), p. 90.]

2. Bertil Malmberg, New Trends in Linguistics, trans. Edward Carners (Stockholm:

Lund, 1964), pp. 65-67 (the example of the Castilian dialect).

3. Ernst Jiinger, Approches; drogues et ivresse (Paris: Table Ronde, 1974), p. 304,

sec. 218.

4. Remy Chauvin in Entretiens sur la sexualit'e, ed. Max Aron, Robert Courrier, and

Etienne Wolff (Paris: Plon, 1969), p. 205.

5. On the work of R. E. Benveniste and G. J. Todaro, see Yves Christen, "Le role des

virus dans 1'evolution," La Recherche, no. 54 (March 1975): "After integration-extraction in a

cell, viruses may, due to an error in excision, carry off fragments of their host's DNA and

NOTES TO PP. 10-17 D 519

transmit them to new cells: this in fact is the basis for what we call 'genetic engineering.' As a
result, the genetic information of one organism may be transferred to another by means of
viruses. We could even imagine an extreme case where this transfer of information would go
from a more highly evolved species to one that is less evolved or was the progenitor of the more
evolved species. This mechanism, then, would run in the opposite direction to evolution in
the classical sense. If it turns out that this kind of transferral of information has played a major
role, we would in certain cases have to substitute reticular schemas (with communications
between branches after they have become differentiated) for the bush or tree schemas currently
used to represent evolution" (p. 271).

6. Francois Jacob, The Logic of Life, trans. Betty E. Spillmann (New York: Pantheon,

1973), pp. 291-292, 311 (quote).

7. Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1971), p. 88.

8. Pierre Boulez, Conversations with C'elestin Deliege(London: Eulenberg Books, 1976):

"a seed which you plant in compost, and suddenly it begins to proliferate like a weed" (p. 15);
and on musical proliferation: "a music that floats, and in which the writing itself makes it
impossible for the performer to keep in with a pulsed time" (p. 69 [translation modified]).

9. See Melanie Klein, Narrative of a Child Analysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1961): the

role of war maps in Richard's activities, [

TRANS

Deleuze and Guattari, with Claire Parnet and

Andre Scala, analyze Klein's Richard and Freud's Little Hans in "The Interpretation of
Utterances," in Language, Sexuality and Subversion, trans. Paul Foss and Meaghan Morris
(Sydney: Feral Publications, 1978), pp. 141-157.]

10. Fernand Deligny, Cahiers de Vimmuable, vol. 1, Voix et voir, Recherches, no. 8

(April 1975).

11. See Dieter Wunderlich, "Pragmatique, situation d'enonciation et Deixis," in

Langages, no. 26 (June 1972), pp. 50ff.: MacCawley, Sadock, and Wunderlich's attempts to
integrate "pragmatic properties" into Chomskian trees.

12. Steven Rose, The Conscious Brain (New York: Knopf, 1975), p. 76; on memory, see

pp. 185-219.

13. See Julien Pacotte, Le r'eseau arborescent, scheme primordial de la pens'ee (Paris:

Hermann, 1936). This book analyzes and develops various schemas of the arborescent form,
which is presented not as a mere formalism but as the "real foundation of formal thought." It
follows classical thought through to the end. It presents all of the forms of the "One-Two," the
theory of the dipole. The set, trunk-roots-branches, yields the following schema:

opposed

segment

More recently, Michel Serres has analyzed varieties and sequences of trees in the most diverse

scientific domains: how a tree is formed on the basis of a "network." La traduction (Paris:

Minuit, 1974), pp. 27ff.; Feux et signaux de brume (Paris: Grasset, 1975), pp. 35ff.

14. Pierre Rosenstiehl and Jean Petitot, "Automate asocial et systemes acentres," Com-

munications, no. 22 (1974), pp. 45-62. On the friendship theorem, see Herbert S. Wilf, The
Friendship Theorem in Combinatorial Mathematics (Welsh Academic Press); and on a simi-

lar kind of theorem, called the theorem of group indecision, see Kenneth J. Arrow, Social
Choice and Individual Values (New York: Wiley, 1963).

15. Rosenstiehl and Petitot, "Automate asocial." The principal characteristic of the

acentered system is that local initiatives are coordinated independently of a central power,

520 □ NOTES TO PP. 17-24

with the calculations made throughout the network (multiplicity). "That is why the only place

files on people can be kept is right in each person's home, since they alone are capable of filling

in the description and keeping it up to date: society itself is the only possible data bank on peo-

ple. A naturally acentered society rejects the centralizing automaton as an asocial intrusion"

(p. 62). On the "Firing Squad Theorem," see pp. 51-57. It even happens that generals, dream-

ing of appropriating the formal techniques of guerrilla warfare, appeal to multiplicities "of

synchronous modules ... based on numerous but independent lightweight cells" having in

theory only a minimum of central power and "hierarchical relaying"; see Guy Brossollet,
Essai surla non-bataille (Paris: Belin, 1975).

16. On Western agriculture of grain plants and Eastern horticulture of tubers, the opposi-

tion between sowing of seeds and replanting of offshoots, and the contrast to animal raising,

see Andre Haudricourt, "Domestication des animaux, culture des plantes et traitement

d'autrui," L'Homme, vol. 2, no. 1 (January-April 1962), pp. 40-50, and "Nature et culture

dans la civilisation de l'igname: l'origine des clones et des clans," L'Homme, vol. 4, no. 1

(January-April 1964), pp. 93-104. Maize and rice are no exception: they are cereals "adopted

at a late date by tuber cultivators" and were treated in a similar fashion; it is probable that rice

"first appeared as a weed in taro ditches."

17. Henry Miller, in Henry Miller and Michael Fraenkel, Hamlet (New York: Carrefour,

1939), pp. 105-106.

18. See Leslie Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American (New York: Stein and Day,

1968). This book contains a fine analysis of geography and its role in American mythology

and literature, and of the reversal of directions. In the East, there was the search for a specifi-

cally American code and for a recoding with Europe (Henry James, Eliot, Pound, etc.); in the

South, there was the overcoding of the slave system, with its ruin and the ruin of the planta-

tions during the Civil War (Faulkner, Caldwell); from the North came capitalist decoding

(Dos Passos, Dreiser); the West, however, played the role of a line of flight combining travel,

hallucination, madness, the Indians, perceptive and mental experimentation, the shifting of

frontiers, the rhizome (Ken Kesey and his "fog machine," the beat generation, etc.). Every

great American author creates a cartography, even in his or her style; in contrast to what is

done in Europe, each makes a map that is directly connected to the real social movements

crossing America. An example is the indexing of geographical directions throughout the work

of Fitzgerald.

19. [

TRANS

Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University

Press, 1957).]

20. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), p.

113. It will be noted that the word "plateau" is used in classical studies of bulbs, tubers, and

rhizomes; see the entry for "Bulb" in M. H. Baillon, Dictionnaire de botanique (Paris:

Hachette, 1876-1892).

21. For example, Joelle de La Casiniere, Absolument necessaire. The Emergency Book

(Paris: Minuit, 1973), a truly nomadic book. In the same vein, see the research in progress at

the Montfaucon Research Center.

22. The Diaries of Franz Kafka, ed. Max Brod, trans. Joseph Kresh (New York: Schocken,

1948), p. 12.

23. Marcel Schwob, The Children's Crusade, trans. Henry Copley (Boston: Small,

Maynard, 1898); JersyAndrzejewski,Lesp0rtesdwpararfzs(Paris:Gallimard, 1959);Armand

Farrachi, La dislocation (Paris: Stock, 1974). It was in the context of Schwob's book that Paul

Alphandery remarked that literature, in certain cases, could revitalize history and impose

upon it "genuine research directions"; La chr'etiente et I'id'ee de croisade (Paris: Albin Michel,

1959), vol. 2, p. 116.

24. See Paul Virilio, "Vehiculaire," in Nomades et vagabonds, ed. Jacques Bergue (Paris:

NOTES TO PP. 24-47 D 521

Union Generale d'Editions, 1975), p. 43, on the appearance of linearity and the disruption of
perception by speed.

25. See Jean-Cristophe Bailly's description of movement in German Romanticism, in his

introduction to La legende dispers'ee. Anthologie du romantisme allemand (Paris: Union
Generale d'Editions, 1976), pp. 18ff.

2.1914: One or Several Wolves?

1. Sigmund Freud, Papers on Metapsychology, vol. 14, Standard Edition, trans. James

Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), p. 200.

2. [

TRANS

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,

1925), p. 11).]

3. E. A. Bennet, What Jung Really Said (New York: Schocken, 1967), p. 74.
4. Ruth Mack Brunswick, "A Supplement to Freud's History of an Infantile Neurosis,"

in The Wolf-Man, ed. Muriel Gardiner (New York: Basic Books, 1971), p. 268.

5. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Viking Press, 1963),

pp. 29-30, 93ff. Some of the distinctions mentioned here are noted by Canetti.

6. [

TRANS

Ibid., p. 93.]

7. Letter cited by Roland Jaccard, L'homme aux loups (Paris: Ed. Universitaires, 1973),

p. 113.

3.10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals

1. Roland Omnes, L'univers et ses metamorphoses (Paris: Hermann, 1973), p. 164: "A

star that has collapsed so far that its radius has fallen below the critical point becomes what is
called a black hole (an occluded star). This expression means that nothing sent in the direction
of such an object will ever come back. It is therefore perfectly black since it does not emit or
reflect any light."

2. Marcel Griaule, Dieu d'eau (Paris: Fayard, 1975), pp. 38-41.
3. For a general treatment of the two aspects of morphogenesis, see Raymod Ruyer, La

genese de formes vivantes (Paris: Flammarion, 1958), pp. 54ff., and Pierre Vendryes, Vie et
probability (Paris: Albin Michel, 1945). Vendryes analyzes the role of the articulatory relation
and articulated systems. On the two structural aspects of protein, see Jacques Monod, Chance
and Necessity, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Vintage, 1972), pp. 90-95.

4. Francois Jacob, The Logic of Life, trans. Betty E. Spillman (New York: Pantheon,

1973), pp. 269-270 [translation modified].

5. Francois Jacob, "Ix modelelinguistique enbiologie,"Cn7/(7«e, no. 322 (March 1974),

p. 202: "Genetic material has two roles: it must be reproduced in order to be transmitted to
the following generation, and it must be expressed in order for it to determine the organism's
structures and functions."

6. Louis Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, trans. Francis J. Whitfield

(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), p. 60.

7. See Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Principes de philosophie zoologique (Paris: Picton et

Didier, 1830), which quotes extracts from the debate with Cuvier; and Notions
synthe-tiques, historiques et physiologiques de philosophie naturelle (Paris: Denain,
1838), in which Geoffroy sets forth his molecular conception of combustion,
electrification, and attraction. Karl Ernest von Baer, Uber Entwicklungsgeschichte der
Thiere (Konigsberg: Beiden Gehrudern Borntrager, 1828-88), and "Biographie de Cuvier,"
in Annales des sciences naturelles (1908). Vialleton, Membres et ceintures des vertebres
tetrapodes (Paris: Doin, 1924).

522 □ NOTES TO PP. 48-62

8. Edmond Perrier deserves a place, although not a decisive one, in this long history.

He returned to the problem of unity of composition, updating the work of Geoffroy with

the aid of Darwin, and especially Lamarck. Perrier's entire work is organized around two

themes: animal colonies or multiplicities, and the speeds necessary to account for het-

erodox degrees and foldings ("tachygenesis"). For example, the brain of a vertebrate may

come to occupy the position of the mouth of an annelid, in the "fight between the mouth

and the brain." See Les colonies animates et la formation des organismes (Paris: G.

Mas-son, 1881), and "L'origine des embranchements du regne animal," Scienta

(May-June 1918). Perrier wrote a history entitled Philosophie zoologique avant Darwin

(Paris: Alcan, 1884), which includes excellent chapters on Geoffroy and Cuvier.

9. Georges Canguilhem et al., "Du developpement a revolution au XIXe siecle," Thales

(1960), p. 34.

10. George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Uni-

versity Press, 1950).

11. Gilbert Simondon, L'individu et sa genese physico-biologique(Paris: PUF, 1964). On

the interior and exterior in the crystal and the organism, and on the role of the limit or mem-

brane, see pp. 107-114 and 259-264.

12. J. H. Rush, The Dawn of Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Hanover House, 1957), p. 165:

"Primitive organisms lived, in some sense, in a state of suffocation. Life had been born, but it

had not yet begun to breathe."

13. Jakob Johann von Uexkiill, Mondes animaux et monde humain (Paris: Gonthier, 1965).

14. See Pia Laviosa-Zambotti, Origini e diffusione della civilita (Milan: C. Marzorati,

1947): her use of the notions of strata, substratum, and parastratum (although she does not

define the last.)

15. Jacob, The Logic of Life, pp. 290-292, 310-312, and what Remy Chauvin calls

"aparallel evolution."

16. See Laviosa-Zambotti, Origini: her conception of waves and flows from center to

periphery, and of nomadism and migrations (nomadic flows).

17. On phenomena of resonance between different orders of magnitude, see Simondon,

L 'individu, pp. 16-20, 124-131, and passim.

18. Claude Popelin, Le taureau et son combat (Paris: Julliard, 1981): see chapter 4 on the

problem of human and bull territories inside the arena.

19. See Simondon, L'individu, on orders of magnitude and the establishment of reso-

nance between them; actions of the "mold," "modulation," and "modeling" types; and exte-

rior forces and intermediate states.

20. Obviously there is a multiplicity of sequences or lines. But that does not preclude the

"order of order" being unilinear (see Jacob, The Logic of Life, p. 286, and "Le modele

linguistique en biologie," pp. 199-203).

21. On the respective independence of proteins and nucleic acids, and their reciprocal

presupposition, see Jacob, The Logic of Life, pp. 304-306, and Jacques Monod, Chance and
Necessity, pp. 96-98, 107-109, 114-115, and 142-144.

22. On the notion of transduction, see Simondon, L'individu, pp. 18-21 (however, he

takes the word in its most general sense and uses it to refer to the entire system). On the mem-

brane, see pp. 259ff.

23. Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Le geste et la parole, vol. 1, of Technique et langage (Paris:

Albin Michel, 1964), p. 161.

24. On all of these problems (the free hand, the supple larynx, the lips, and the role of the

steppe as factors of deterritorialization), see Emile Devaux's fine book, Trois problemes:
Tespece, I'inslinct, I'homme (Paris: Le Francois, 1933), part 3 (chapter 7: "The anthropoid,

severed from the forest, retarded in its development, infantilized, had to acquire free hands

NOTES TO PP. 62-77 □ 523

and a supple larynx"; and chapter 9: "The forest made the monkey, the cave and the steppe
made the human").

25. Jacob, The Logic of Life, pp. 278,289-290,298. Jacob and Monod sometimes use the

word "translation" for the genetic code, but only for reasons of convenience. As Monod points
out, "The code can be translated only by products of translation."

26. Leroi-Gourhan, Legesteet la parole, pp. 269-275.
27. [

TRANS

A reference to the work of Julia Kristeva. On the chora, see Kristeva, Revolu-

tion in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press,
1984), pp. 25-30.]

28. That is why we consider Hjelmslev, despite his own reservations and vacillations, to

be the only linguist to have actually broken with the signifier and the signified. Many other lin-
guists seem to make this break deliberately and without reservations, but retain the implicit
presuppositions of the signifier.

29. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vin-

tage, 1975). Already in The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New
York: Pantheon, 1982), Foucault outlines his theory of the two kinds of multiplicities, multi-
plicities of expression or statements and multiplicities of contents or objects. He shows that
they are irreducible to the signifier-signified couple. He also explains why the title of one of
his earlier books, Les mots et les choses [Words and Things, translated as The Order of Things
(New York: Vintage, 1970)], must be understood negatively (pp. 48-49).

30. [

TRANS

Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 9.]

31. Simondon, L'individu, pp. 139-141.
32. H. P. Lovecraft, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key," in The Dream-Quest of

Unknown Kadath (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), pp. 168, 217-218.

4. November 20,1923: Postulates of Linguistics

1. [

TRANS

Mot d'ordre: in standard French, "slogan," (military) "password." Deleuze

and Guattari are also using the term literally: "word of order," in the double sense of a word or

phrase constituting a command and a word or phrase creative of order]

2. Georges Darien, L'epaulette (Paris: 10/18, 1973), p. 435. Or Zola, La BeteHumaine,

trans. Leonard Tancock (New York: Penguin, 1977), p. 148: "She was saying this not to con-

vince him, but solely to warn him that she had to be innocent in the eyes of the world at large."

This type of phrase seems to us to be much more characteristic of the novel in general than the

informational phrase, "the marquess went out at five o'clock."

3. Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York:

Knopf, 1932), p. 54 [translation modified].

4. Brice Parain, Sur la dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1953). Parain develops a theory of

"supposition" or the presupposed in language in relation to the orders given to life; but he sees

this less as a power in the political sense than a duty in the moral sense.

5. Two authors in particular have brought out the importance of indirect discourse, espe-

cially in its so-called free form, from the viewpoint of a theory of enunciation that goes beyond

the traditional categories of linguistics: V. N. Volosinov (for Russian, German, and French),
Marxism and the Philosophy of Language [attributed to Mikhail Bakhtin in the French edi-

tion cited by the authors—

TRANS

trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik. (Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), Part 3, "Toward a History of Forms and Utterance in

Language Constructions," pp. 109-200; Pier Paolo Pasolini (for Italian), Vexperience
heretique (Paris: Payot, 1976), part 1. We have also referred to an unpublished study by J.-P.

Bamberger, "Les formes du discours indirect dans le cinema, muet et parlant."

6. Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek

524 □ NOTES TO PP. 77-82

(Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1971), p. 53: "There is no indication, for

example, that a bee goes off to another hive with the message it has received in its own hive.

This would constitute a kind of transmission or relay."

7. William Labov has clearly shown the contradiction, or at least paradox, created by the

distinction between language and speech: language is defined as the "social part" of language,

and speech is consigned to individual variations; but since the social part is self-enclosed, it

necessarily follows that a single individual would be enough to illustrate the principles of lan-

guage, without reference to any outside data, whereas speech could only be studied in a social

context. The same paradox recurs from Saussure to Chomsky: "The social aspect of language

is studied by observing any one individual, but the individual aspect only by observing lan-

guage in its social context"; Labov, Sociolinguistic Patterns (Philadelphia: University of Penn-

sylvania Press, 1972), p. 186.

8. Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, part 4 ("Man and Language"); on the

elimination of the illocutionary, see pp. 237-238.

9. Oswald Ducrot, Dire et nepas dire (Paris: Hermann, 1972), pp. 70-80, and "De Saus-

sure a la philosophie du langage," preface to the French translation of S. R. Searle's Speech
Acts, Actes de langage (Paris: Hermann, 1972). Ducrot challenges the notions of linguistic

information and code, and communication and subjectivity. He develops a theory of "linguistic

presupposition" or nondiscursive implicitness, as opposed to concluded and discursive

implicitness still referring to a code. He constructs a pragmatics covering all of linguistics and

moves toward a study of assemblages of enunciation, considered from a "juridical," "polemi-

cal," or "political" point of view.

10. Bakhtin and Labov have stressed the social character of enunciation, in different

ways. They are consequently in opposition not only to subjectivism but also to structuralism,

to the extent that the latter ties the system of language to the understanding of an ideal indi-

vidual, and social factors to actual individuals as speakers.

11. Ducrot, Dire et nepas dire, p. 77: "To qualify an action as criminal (theft, fraud, black-

mail, etc.) is not, in our sense of the term, to present it as an act since the legal situation of guilt,

which defines a crime, is supposed to derive from other given consequences of the activity

described: the activity is considered punishable because it is harmful to another person, to

order, to society, etc. The judge's statement of a sentence can, on the other hand, be consid-

ered a juridical act because there is no intervening effect between the speech of the judge and

the transformation of the accused into a convict."

12. John Kenneth Galbraith, Money (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), chapter 12, "The

Ultimate Inflation": "On November 20, 1923, the curtain was rolled down. As in Austria a

year earlier, the end came suddenly. As with the milder French inflation, the end came with

astonishing ease. Perhaps it ended simply because it could not go on. On November 20, the

old reichsmark was declared to be no longer money. A new currency, the rentenmark, was

introduced .... The new rentenmark was declared to be backed by a first mortgage on all the

land and other physical assets of the Reich. This idea had its ancestry in the assignats; it was,

however, appreciably more fraudulent [Galbraith means to say 'deterritorialized'—Au.]. In

France in 1789, there was extant, visible land freshly taken from the church for which cur-

rency initially could be exchanged; any German seeking to exercise rights of foreclosure on

German property with his rentenmarks would have been thought mentally unstable. Never-

theless, it worked. Circumstances helped.. . . If, after 1923, the previous claims on the Ger-

man budget had continued—the reparations claims and the cost of passive resistance—

nothing would have saved the mark and [the head of the Reichsbank's] reputation"; pp. 159,

161.

13. Volosinov [Bakhtin], Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, p. 110. And on

"symbolic relations of force" as variables internal to enunciation, see Pierre Bourdieu,

NOTES TO PP. 82-91 □ 525

"L'economie des echanges linguistiques," in Linguistique et sociolinguistique, Langue
Francaise, May 1977, pp. 18-21.

14. The very notion of the proletarian class hinges on the question, Does the proletariat

already exist at a given moment, and if so as a body? (Or, does it still exist?) It is evident that

Marxists use it in an anticipatory sense, as, for example, when they speak of an "embryonic

proletariat."

15. [

TRANS

V. I. Lenin, "On Slogans," Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers,

1975), vol. 3, p. 148.]

16. Quoted by David Cooper, The Language of Madness (London: Allen Lane, 1978), p.

34. Cooper comments that "the language of 'hearing voices' ... means that one becomes

aware of something that exceeds the consciousness of normal [i.e., direct] discourse and

which therefore must be experienced as 'other'" (p. 34).

17. Elias Canetti is one of the rare authors who has dealt with the psychological mode of

action of the order-word, or "command": Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New

York: Viking Press, 1963), pp. 303-333. He hypothesizes that an order inflicts a kind of sting

on the soul, which forms a cyst, a hardening that never goes away. When this happens, the

only way to find relief is to pass it on to others as quickly as possible, to "massify," even

though the mass may turn back against the emitter of the order-word. In addition, the fact

that the order-word is like a foreign body within the body, an indirect discourse within

speech, explains the extraordinary forgetting that occurs: "The person who carries out a

command. . . does not accuse himself, but the sting: this is the true culprit, whom he carries

with him everywhere.... It is his permanent witness that it was not he himself who perpe-

trated a given wrong. He sees himself as its victim and thus has no feeling left for the real vic-

tim. It is true, therefore, that people who have acted on orders can feel entirely guiltless,"

making it all the easier for them to move on to other order-words (p. 332). This provides a

profound explanation for the Nazis' feeling of innocence, or for the capacity of forgetfulness

displayed by old Stalinists, whose amnesia worsens the more they invoke their memory and

past in order to claim the right to follow new and even more insidious order-words—"sting

mania." In this respect, Canetti's analysis seems essential. However, it presupposes the exis-

tence of a very particular psychic faculty in the absence of which the order-word would not

have this mode of action. The whole classical rationalist theory—of "common sense," of

universally shared good sense based on information and communication—is a way to cover

up or hide, and to justify in advance, a much more disturbing faculty, that of order-words.

This singularly irrational faculty is best safeguarded by gracing it with the name of pure rea-

son, by saying that it is nothing but pure reason ...

18. See Emile Brehier's classic study, La theorie des incorporels dans I'ancien stdicisme

(Paris: Vrin, 1970). On "the knife cuts the flesh" and "the tree turns green," see pp. 12 and 20.

19. [

TRANS

Kafka, The Castle, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Knopf, 1976),

P- 12.]

20. [

TRANS

Kafka, "The Stoker," chapter 1 of Amerika, trans. Edwin Muir (Norfolk,

Conn.: New Directions, 1940.]

21. Stalin, in his famous text on linguistics [Marxism and Linguistics (New York: Inter-

national Publishers, 1951)—Trans.], claims to identify two neutral forms serving all of soci-

ety, all classes, and all regimes equally: instruments and machines as pure means of

production of goods, and language as a pure means of information and communication.

Even Bakhtin defines language as the form of ideology, but he specifies that the form of ide-

ology is not itself ideological.

22. On these problems, see J. M. Sadock, "Hypersentences" (Diss. University of Illinois,

1968); Dieter Wunderlich, "Pragmatique, situation d'enonciation et Deixis," Langages, no.

36 (June 1972), pp. 34-58; and especially S. K. Saumjan, "Aspects algebriques de la gram-

526 □ NOTES TO PP. 91-99

maire applicative," Langages, no. 33 (March 1974), pp. 95-122. Saumjan proposes a model of

abstract objects based on the operation of application called AGM (applicative generative

model). He cites Hjelmslev as an influence; Hjelmslev's strength is to have conceived of the

form of expression and the form of content as two entirely relative variables on one and the

same plane, as "functives of one and the same function," Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory
of Language, trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison; University of Wisconsin Press, 1969).

This advance toward a diagrammatic conception of the abstract machine is, however, coun-

teracted by the fact that Hjelmslev still conceives the distinction between expression and con-

tent in the signifier-signified mode and therefore retains the subordination of the abstract

machine to linguistics.

23. See Herbert Brekle, Semantique (Paris: A. Colin, 1974), pp. 94-104, on the idea of a

universal pragmatics and of "universals of dialogue."

24. On this budding and various representations of it, see Wunderlich, "Pragmatique, sit-

uation d'enonciation et Deixis."

25. Noam Chomsky, Language and Responsibility. Based on Conversations with Mitsou

Ronat, trans. John Viertel (New York: Pantheon, 1979), pp. 53-55.

26. William Labov, Sociolinguistic Patterns, especially pp. 187-190. It will be noted that

Labov at times limits himself to statements that have approximately the same meaning and at

other times disregards this condition in order to follow a sequence of complementary but het-

erogeneous statements.

27. [

TRANS

This is a phrase from Proust's Time Regained in Remembrance of Things

Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor (New York: Ran-

dom House, 1981), vol. 3, p. 905 (vol. 3, p. 872, in the French "Pleiade" edition). See Deleuze,
Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Braziller, 1972), pp. 59-60.]

28. This is indeed how Labov tends to define his notion of "optional or variable rules," as

opposed to constant rules: not simply an observed frequency, but a specific quantity express-

ing the probability of the frequency or the application of the rule. See Language in the Inner
City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), pp. 94ff.

29. See Gilbert Rouget's article, "Un chromatisme africain," in L'Homme, vol. 1, no. 3

(September-December 1961), pp. 32-46 (this issue comes with a recording of ritual chants of

Dahomey).

30. Gherasim Luca, Le chant de la carpe (Paris: Soleil Noir, 1973), and the recording put

out by Givaudan, on which Luca recites the poem "Passionnement."

31. [

TRANS

See Carmelo Bene and Gilles Deleuze, Superpositions (Paris: Minuit, 1979).

Forthcoming in English translation from Semiotext(e).]

32. "And" has an especially important role in English literature, as a function not only of

the Old Testament but also of the "minorities" at work on the language: one case in point is J.

M. Synge (see Francois Regnault's remarks on coordination in Anglo-Irish in the French

translation of Playboy of the Western World, Baladin du monde occidental [Paris:

Biblio-theque du Graphe]). It should not be thought adequate to analyze the "and" as a

conjunction; rather, "and" is a special form of every possible conjunction and brings into play a

logic of language. Jean Wahl's works contain profound reflections on this sense of "and," on

the way it challenges the primacy of the verb "to be."

33. Hjelmslev, Language: An Introduction, trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison: Univer-

sity of Wisconsin Press, 1970), pp. 39ff.

34. Nicolas Ruwet, "Parallelisme et deviations en poesie," in Langue, discours, societe.

Pour Emile Benveniste, ed. Julia Kristeva, Nicolas Ruwet, and Jean-Claude Milner (Paris:

Seuil, 1975). Ruwet analyzes Poem 29 in Cummings's Fifty Poems (New York: Duell, Sloan

and Pearce, 1940); he gives a restricted and structuralist interpretation of this phenomenon of

variation, invoking the notion of parallelism; in other texts, he minimizes the importance of

NOTES TO PP. 99-106 □ 527

these variations, treating them as marginal exercises irrelevant to true changes in language;

still, his comments seem to us to transcend all of these interpretive restrictions.

35. See Vidal Sephiha, "Introduction a l'etude de l'intensif," Langages, no. 29 (March

1973). This is one of the first studies of the atypical tensions and variations of language, par-

ticularly as they appear in so-called minor languages.

36. On the expansion and diffusion of states of language, in the "patch of oil" mode or the

"paratrooper" mode, see Bertil Malmberg, New Trends in Linguistics, trans. Edward Carners

(Stockholm: Lund, 1964), chapter 3 (which uses N. Lindqvist's important studies on dialect).

What are needed now are comparative studies of how homogenizations and centralizations of

given major languages take place. In this respect, the linguistic history of French is not at all

the same as that of English; neither is their relation to writing as a form of homogenization the

same. For French, the centralized language par excellence, one may refer to the analysis of

Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, and Jacques Revel, Une politique de la langue (Paris:

Gallimard, 1975). The analysis covers a very brief period at the end of the eighteenth century,

focusing on Abbot Gregory, and notes two distinct periods: one in which the central language

opposed the rural dialects, just as the town opposed the countryside, and the capital the prov-

inces; and another in which it opposed "feudal idioms," as well as the language of the emigres,

just as the Nation opposes everything that is foreign to it, an enemy of it (pp. 160ff: "It is also

obvious that the rejection of the dialects resulted from a technical inability to grasp stable

laws in regional speech patterns").

37. See Michel Lalonde, Change, no. 30 (March 1977), pp. 100-122, where the poem,

"Speak White," quoted in text, appears, along with a manifesto on the Quebecois language

("La deffense et illustration de la langue quebecqoyse").

38. On the complex situation of Afrikaans, see Breyten Breytenbach's fine book, Feu

Froid (Paris: Bourgois, 1976); G. M. Lory's study (pp. 101-107) elucidates Breytenbach's

project, the violence of his poetic treatment of the language, and his will to be a "bastard, with

a bastard language."

39. On the double aspect of minor language, poverty-ellipsis, and overload-variation, one

may refer to a certain number of exemplary studies: Klauss Wagenbach's study of the German

of Prague at the beginning of the twentieth century (Franz Kafka. Eine Biographie seiner
Jugend [Bern: Francke, 1958]); Pasolini's study demonstrating that Italian was not con-

structed on the basis of a new standard or mean, but exploded in two simultaneous directions,

"upward and downward," in other words, toward simplified material and expressive exagger-

ation (L'experience heretique, pp. 46-47); J. L. Dillard's study bringing out the double ten-

dency of Black English on the one hand to omit, lose, disencumber, and on the other to

overload, to develop "fancy talk" {Black English [New York: Random House, 1972]). As

Dillard notes, there is no inferiority to the standard language; instead there is a correlation

between two movements that necessarily escape from the standard level of language. Still on

the topic of Black English, LeRoi Jones shows the extent to which the two conjoined direc-

tions approximate language to music (Blues People [New York: William Morrow, 1963], pp.

30-31 and all of chapter 3). On a more general level, one will recall Pierre Boulez's analysis of a

double movement in music, dissolution of form, and dynamic overload or proliferation: Con-
versations with Celestin Deliege, (London: Eulenberg Books, 1976), pp. 20-22.

40. Yann Moulier, preface to Mario Tronti, Ouvriers et Capital (Paris: Bourgois, 1977),

p. 6.

41. Pasolini, L 'experience heretique, p. 62

42. See the "Strategy Collective" manifesto on the Quebecois language in Change, no. 30

(March 1977): it denounces the "myth of subversive language," which implies that simply

being in a minority is enough to make one a revolutionary ("this mechanist equation derives

from a populist conception of language __ Speaking the language of the working class is not

528 □ NOTES TO PP. 106-120

what links an individual to the positions of that class.... The argument that Joual has a sub-
versive, countercultural force is entirely idealistic"; p. 188).

43. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (see the two essential chapters corresponding to the

two aspects of the order-word, "The Command" and "Transformation"; especially pp.
313-314, describing the pilgrimage to Mecca and its two coded aspects, mortifying
petrification and panicked flight).

44. [

TRANS

Translated as "prohibitions of transformation" in the English version of

Crowds and Power. Enantio- is from the Greek, "to oppose."]

45. [

TRANS

Canetti, Crowds and Power, pp. 378, 380.]

46. As we have seen, Hjelmslev imposes a restrictive condition, that of assimilating the

plane of content to a kind of "signified." Certain authors are therefore correct in objecting
that the analysis of content he proposes has less to do with linguistics than other disciplines,
such as zoology (for example, Andre Martinet, with the collaboration of Jeanne Martinet and
HenrietteWalter,Lalinguistique. Guidealphab'etique[Paris: Danoel, 1969],p. 353).Itseems
to us, however, that this objection applies only to Hjelmslev's restrictive condition.

47. [

TRANS

See 12, "1227: Treatise on Nomadology," pp. 351-423.]

48. See the details of the text of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Lettres du voyageur a son retour,

trans. Jean-Ciaude Schneider (Paris: Mercure de France, 1969), letter of May 9, 1901.

5. 587 B.C.-A.D. 70: On Several Regimes of Signs

1. Claude Levi-Strauss, "Introduction a l'oeuvre de Marcel Mauss," in Marcel Mauss,

Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: PUF, 1973),pp.48-49 (later in this text Levi-Strauss brings

out another aspect of the signified). On this first aspect of the atmospheric continuum, see the

Binswanger's and Arieti's psychiatric descriptions.

2. See Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp.

209ff. (an analysis of the two cases).

3. Levi-Strauss, preface to Don C. Talayesva, Soleil Hopi (Paris: Plon, 1968), p. vi [trans-

lation of Sun Chief, ed. Leo W. Simmons (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1942)].

4. For example, in Bantu myth the first founder of the State shows his face and eats and

drinks in public, whereas the hunter, subsequently the warrior, invents the art of secrecy. See

Luc de Heusch, Le roi ivre ou I'origine de I'Etat (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), pp. 20-25. Heusch

sees the second moment as proof of a more "refined" civilization; to us, on the other hand, it is

a different semiotic system, that of war rather than public works.

5. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vin-

tage, 1975), p. 29 [translation modified].

6. See A. J. Greimas, "Pratiques et langagesgestuels," in Conditions d'une semiotiquedu

monde naturel, Langages, no. 10 (June 1968), pp. 3-35. Greimas, however, relates this

semiotic to categories such as "the subject of the statement" and the "subject of enunciation,"

which seem to us to belong to other regimes of signs.

7. On cannibalism as a way of protecting against the souls or names of the dead, and on

its semiotic function as "calendar," see Pierre Clastres, Chronique des Indiens Guayaki (Paris:

Plon, 1972), pp. 332-340.

8. The foregoing expressions concerning the number are borrowed from Julia Kristeva.

Kristeva, however, uses them in an analysis of literary texts based on the hypothesis of the

"signifier": Semiotike. Recherches pour une semanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1969), pp. 294ff, 317.

9. See Paul Serieux and Joseph Capgras, Lesfolies raisonnantes (Paris: Alcan, 1909), and

Gatian Clerambault, Oeuvre psychiatrique, rpt. (Paris: PUF, 1942). Capgras believes in an

essentially mixed or polymorphous semiotic; Clerambault abstractly analyzes two pure

semiotics, although he does recognize that they form de facto mixes. The principal texts on

NOTES TO PP. 120-125 □ 529

the origin of the distinction between two groups of delusions are Jean Esquirol, Des maladies
mentales(Brussels: J. B. Tircher, 1838) (to what extent is "monomania" distinguishable from

mania?); and Emil Kraepelin, Psychiatrie. Ein Lehrbuch fur Studierende undArtze, 8th ed.

(Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1920) [English translation, Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry, rpt., ed.

Thomas Johnstone (New York: Hafner, 1968)] (to what extent is "querulous delusion" distin-

guishable from paranoia?). The question of the second group of delusions, or the passional

delusions, was broached and analyzed historically by Jacques Lacan, De la psychose
parano'iaque (Paris: Seuil, 1975), and by Daniel Lagache, La jalousie amoureuse (Paris: PUF,

1947).

10. See Serieux and Capgras, Lesfolies raisonnantes, pp. 340ff, and Clerambault, Oeuwe

psychiatrique, pp. 369ff: people with passional delusion are overlooked, even in the asylum,

because they are calm and cunning, "suffering from a limited enough delusion that they know

how we judge them." This makes it all the more necessary to keep them confined; "such

patients must not be questioned, but rather maneuvered, and the only way to maneuver them

is to move them emotionally."

11. Esquirol suggests that monomania is a "disease of civilization" and has a social evolu-

tion: it begins religious but tends to become more and more political, tracked by the police
(Des maladies mentales, vol. 1, p. 400). See also the remarks of Emmanuel Regis, Les regicides
dans I'histoire et dans le present (Lyons: A. Storck, 1890).

12. Deuteronomy 1:12. In the "Pleiade" edition of the Bible (Paris: Gallimard, 1959),vol.

1, p. 510, editor Edouard Dhorme specifies: "Your grievance, literally your proceeding."

13. D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse (New York: Viking, 1932), pp. 93-94.
14. See Edouard Dhorme, La religion des Hebreux nomades (Brussels: Nouvelle

Societe d'Editions, 1937), and Zecharia Mayani, Les Hyksos et le monde de la Bible (Paris:

Payot, 1956). The author emphasizes the connections between the Hebrews and the

Ha-biru (nomadic warriors) and Kenites (nomadic metal workers); what is specific to

Moses is not the principle of numerical organization, which was borrowed from the

nomads, but the idea of an always revocable convention-proceeding, contract-proceeding.

This idea, according to Mayani, derives neither from the rooted farmers nor from the

nomadic warriors, nor even from the migrants, but from a tribe on the march that thinks of

itself in terms of subjective destiny.

15. See Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken,

1968). The painter Titorelli originates the theory of indefinite postponement. Aside from def-

inite acquittal, which does not exist, Titorelli differentiates the two juridical regimes of

"ostensible acquittal" and "indefinite postponement"; the first is circular and linked to a

semiotic of the signifier, whereas the second is linear and segmentary, linked to the passional

semiotic(pp. 152-162).

16. [

TRANS

The King James Bible reads "to flee ... from the presence of the Lord."

Jonah 1:3.]

17. Jerome Lindon was the first to analyze the relation between Jewish prophetism and

betrayal, in the exemplary case of Jonah. Jonas (Paris: Minuit, 1955).

18. Friedrich Holderlin, Remarques sur Oedipe (Paris: Union Generate d'Edition, 1965).

Holderlin already puts limits on the character of this "slow and difficult" death; see Jean

Beaufret's fine discussion of the nature of this death and its relation to betrayal: "Man must

match the categorical turning away of the god, now no more than Time, by himself turning

away as a traitor."

19. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vin-

tage, 1967), sec. 9.

20. [

TRANS

See 10, "1730: Becoming-Intense ...," note 10.]

21. [

TRANS

"Buggers," from the Middle French for "Bulgarians," originally referred to a

530 □ NOTES TO PP. 125-141

sect of heretics from Bulgaria suspected of 'unnatural' practices, and later became a general

term for heretics before taking on its modern meaning.]

22. On the nature of the epic "library" (its imperial character, the role of priests, the circu-

lation between sanctuaries and cities), see Charles Autran, Homere et les origines sacerdotales
de I'epopee grecque, 3 vols. (Paris: Denoel, 1938-1944).

23. See the techniques for the interpretation of books in the Middle Ages, and the extreme

attempt by Joachim de Flore, who, on the basis of similarities between the two Testaments,

induces from within a third state or proceeding. L 'Evangile eternel (Paris: Rieder, 1928).

24. For example, Exodus 19:2: "For they were departed from Rephidim, and were come to

the desert of Sinai, and had pitched in the wilderness, and there Israel camped before the

mount."

25. Henry Miller, Sexus (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 250.

26. Louis Althusser, "Ideologic et appareils ideologiques d'Etat," La pens'ee, no. 151

(May-June 1970), pp. 29-35.

27. In Problems of General Linguistics, trans Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Fla.:

University of Florida Press, 1971), pp. 217-222, Emile Benveniste speaks of a proceeding, or

process (proces).

28. One aspect of Strindberg's genius was to elevate the couple, and the domestic squab-

ble, to an intense semiotic level, and to make it a creative factor in the regime of signs. This was

not the case with Jouhandeau. Klossowski, on the other hand, was able to invent new sources

and conflicts for the passional cogito for two, from the standpoint of a general theory of signs;
Les lois de I'hospilalile (Paris: Gallimard, 1965).

29. See also Dostoyevsky's The Double.

30. On these two forms of redundancy, see the entry on "Redondance" in Andre Martinet,

La linguistique. Guide alphab'etique (Paris: Danoel, 1969), pp. 331-333.

31. Henry Miller, Sexus, p. 229. The theme of the idiot is itself quite diverse. It is an

explicit part of the cogito according to Descartes, and feeling according to Rousseau. Russian

literature, however, takes it down other paths, beyond consciousness or passion.

32. Gherasim Luca, Le chant de la carpe (Paris: Soleil Noir, 1973), pp. 87-94.

33. For example, when the whites introduced money to the Siane of New Guinea, the lat-

ter started off by translating the bills and coins into two categories of nonconvertible goods.

See Maurice Godelier, "Economie politique et anthropologic economique," L'Homme, vol.

14, no. 3 (September-December 1964), p. 123.

34. On these translations-transformations, see LeRoi Jones, Blues People (New York:

Morrow, 1963), chapters 3-7.

35. Miller, Sexus, pp. 479-480.

36. Mary Barnes and Joseph Berke, Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey through

Madness (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p. 233. The failure of the

antipsychi-atry experiment of Kingsley Hall apparently was due as much to these internal

factors as to external circumstances.

37. Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), p. 14.
38. "Generative" and "transformational" are Chomsky's terms. For him, the transforma-

tional is precisely the best and most profound way of realizing the generative; we, however, are

using the terms in a different sense.

39. Michel Foucault has developed, in successive levels, a theory of statements addressing

all of these problems. (1) In The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New

York: Pantheon, 1982), Foucault distinguishes two kinds of "multiplicities," of content and of

expression, which are not reducible to relations of correspondence or causality, but are in

reciprocal presupposition. (2) In Discipline and Punish, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New

York: Vintage, 1975), he looks for an agency capable of accounting for the two imbricated,

NOTES TO PP. 141-153 □ 531

heterogeneous forms, and finds it in assemblages of power, or micropowers. (3) But these col-
lective assemblages (school, army, factory, hospital, prison, etc.) are only degrees or singulari-
ties in an abstract "diagram," which for its part has only matter and function (the unspecified
multiplicity of human beings to be controlled). (4) The History of Sexuality. Vol.
l.Anlntro-duction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), takes yet another
direction since assemblages are no longer related to and contrasted with a diagram, but rather
to a "biopoli-tics of population" as an abstract machine. Our only points of disagreement with
Foucault are the following: (1) to us the assemblages seem fundamentally to be assemblages
not of power but of desire (desire is always assembled), and power seems to be a stratified
dimension of the assemblage; (2) the diagram and abstract machine have lines of flight that are
primary, which are not phenomena of resistance or counterattack in an assemblage, but
cutting edges of creation and deterritorialization.

40. Louis Hjelmslev proposed a very important conception of "matter" or "purport"

(sens) as unformed, amorphous, or formless: Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, trans.
Francis J. Whitfield (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), sec. 13, pp. 47-60, and
Essais linguistiques (Paris: Minuit, 1971), pp. 58ff. (see also the preface by Francois Rastier,
p. 9).

41. The distinction between indexes, icons, and symbols comes from C. S. Peirce, Col-

lected Papers, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1931-1958). But his distinctions are based on signifier-signified relations (contiguity
for the index, similitude for the icon, conventional rule for the symbol); this leads him to make
the "diagram" a special case of the icon (the icon of relation). Peirce is the true inventor of
semiotics. That is why we can borrow his terms, even while changing their connotations. First,
indexes, icons, and symbols seem to us to be distinguished by
territoriality-deterritorializa-tion relations, not signifier-signified relations. Second, the
diagram as a result seems to have a distinct role, irreducible to either the icon or the symbol.
On Peirce's fundamental distinctions and the complex status of the diagram, one may refer
to Jakobson's analysis, "A la recherche de l'essence du langage," in Problemes du langage,
ed. Emile Benveniste (Paris: Gallimard, 1966).

6. November 28,1947: How to Make Yourself a Body without Organs

1. [

TRANS

Antonin Artaud, "To Have Done With the Judgement of God," Selected Writ-

ings, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), p. 571.]

2. [

TRANS

Jules Cotard, Etard sur les maladies cerebrates et mentales (Paris:

Brail-liere, 1891).]

3. [

TRANS

Dr. Schreber's Memoirs, quoted by Sigmund Freud, Notes on a Case

ofPara-noia, vol. 12, Standard Edition, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957),

p. 17.]

4. William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (New York: Grove Press, 1966), p. 131.

5. The opposition program-phantasy appears clearly in the work of Michel de M'uzan,

in relation to a case of masochism. See M'uzan in La sexualit'e perverse, ed. Isle and Robert

Barande et al. (Paris: Payot, 1972), p. 36. Although he does not specifically discuss this

opposition, M'uzan uses the notion of the program to question the themes of Oedipus, anxi-

ety, and castration.

6. See Kurt Lewin's description of the flow of meat in the American family, "Psychologi-

cal Ecology," Field Theory in Social Science, ed. Dorwin Cartwright (New York: Harper and

Brothers, 1951), pp. 170-187.

7. Albert Dalcq, L'oeufet son dynamisme organisateur (Paris: Albin Michel, 1941), p.

95: "Forms are contingent upon kinematic dynamism. It is secondary whether or not an ori-

fice forms in the germ. All that counts is the process of immigration itself; what yields an ori-

532 □ NOTES TO PP. 153-170

fice fissure or primitive line is not invagination, but pure chronological and quantitative variations."

8. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, p. 8.
9. Ibid., pp. xlv-xlvi.

10. [

TRANS

Jouissance: "pleasure, enjoyment, orgasm." In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the object

of desire is irrevocably lost and the subject eternally split. Jouissanceis doubly impossible: life is a
manque-a-jouir, read as "lack of enjoyment," because the true object of desire is unattainable; and it
is a manque-a-jouir, read as "a lack to be enjoyed," because jouissance as the orgasmic plenitude of
union with a substitute object means the annulment of the constitutionally split subject. One of the
necessary terms, the subject or the object, is always missing.]

11. Roger Dupouy, "Du masochisme," Annales m'edico-psychologiques, series 12, vol. 2

(1929), p. 405.

12. Ibid.
13. On courtly love, and its radical immanence rejecting both religious transcendence and

hedonist exteriority, see Rene Nelli, L'erotique des troubadours (Paris: Union Generale d'Editions,
1974), in particular, vol. l,pp. 267, 316, 358, and 370, and vol. 2, pp. 47, 53, and 75. (Also vol. 1, p.
128: one of the major differences between chivalric love and courtly love is that for "knights the
valor by which one merits love is always external to love," whereas in the system of courtly love, the
test is essentially internal to love; war valor is replaced by "sentimental heroism." This is a mutation
in the war machine.)

14. Robert Van Gulik, Sexual Life in Ancient China (Leiden: Brill, 1961); and Jean-Francois

Lyotard's discussion of it, Economie libidinale (Paris: Minuit, 1974), pp. 241 -251.

15. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), p. 113.
16. Artaud, H'eliogabale, in Oeuvres Completes (Paris: Gallimard), pp. 50-51. It is true that

Artaud still presents the identity of the One and the Multiple as a dialectical unity, one that reduces
the multiple by gathering it into the One. He makes Heliogabalus a kind of Hegelian. But that is a
manner of speaking, for from the beginning multiplicity surpasses all opposition and does away with
dialectical movement.

17. [

TRANS

Artaud, "The Body Is the Body," trans. Roger McKeon, Semiotext(e), Anti-Oedipus,

vol. 2, no. 3 (1977), p. 59.]

18. Artaud, The Peyote Dance (translation of Les Tarahumaras), trans. Helen Weaver (New

York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), pp. 38-39 [translation modified].

19. [

TRANS

Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), p. 125.]

20. [

TRANS

Ibid., p. 183.]

21. [

TRANS

Ibid., p. 161.]

22. See Cause commune, no. 3 (October 1972).

7. Year Zero: Faciality

1. Josef von Sternberg, Funin a Chinese Laundry(Nev/ York: MacMillan, 1965), p. 324.

[

TRANS

The English version of this phrase reads "merciful darkness."]

2. [

TRANS

"Blumfeld. An Elderly Gentleman." The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka, ed.

Nahum N. Glazer (New York: Schocken, 1983), pp. 183-205.]

3. On this ballet, see Jean Barraque's Debussy (Paris: Seuil, 1977), which cites the text of the

argument, pp. 166-171.

4. See Otto Isakower, "Contribution a la psychopathologie des phenomenes associes a

I'endormissement," Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse, no. 5 (Spring 1972), pp. 197-210; Bertram D.
Lewin, "Le sommeil, la bouche et l'ecran du reve," ibid., pp. 211-224; and Rene

NOTES TO PP. 170-183 □ 533

Spitz, with the collaboration of W. Godfrey Cobliner, The First Year of Life (New York: Inter-

national Publishers, 1965), pp. 75-82.

5. Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn (New York: Grove Press, 1961), pp. 121-123.

6. Klaatsch, "L'evolution du genre humain," in Kreomer, L'Univers et I'humanit'e, vol.

2: "In vain, we tried to find a trace of red edging around the lips of live, young chimpanzees,

which resemble man so closely in all other respects.... How would the face of the most gra-

cious young woman look if her mouth was a stripe between two white borders?... In addition,

the pectoral region of the anthropoid possesses the two nipples of the mammary glands, but

folds of fat comparable to the breasts never form." And Emile Devaux's formula in Trois
problemes: I'espece, I'instinct, rhomme(Paris: Le Francois, 1933), p. 264: "The child made the

woman's breast, and the mother the child's lips."

7. Face exercises play an essential role in the pedagogical principles of J.-B. de la Salle.

Even Ignacio de Loyola integrated his teaching landscape exercises or "compositions of

place" relative to the life of Christ, hell, the world, etc. As Barthes points out, this involves

skeletal images subordinated to a language, but also active schemas to be completed, colored

in, like those found in catechisms and devotional handbooks [Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans.

Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976)—Trans.]

8. Chretien de Troyes, The Story of the Grail, trans. Robert White Linker (Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 1952), pp. 88-89. A similar scene, dominated by the

"machinery" of the boat, is found in Malcolm Lowry's novel Ultramarine (Philadelphia:

Lippincott, 1962), pp. 159-172: a pigeon drowns in waters infested by sharks, "as if a red leaf

should fall on a white torrent" (p. 170), and this inevitably evokes the image of a bloody face.

Lowry's scene is imbedded in such different elements and is so particularly organized that

there can be no question of influence by Chretien de Troyes's scene, only confluence with it.

This makes it an even better confirmation of the existence of a veritable black hole or red

mark-white wall abstract machine (snow or water).

9. [

TRANS

Continued in 10, "1730: Becoming-Intense ...," pp. 232-309]

10. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form and Film Sense, trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Meridian

Books, 1957), p. 195-199: "'The kettle began it...' Thus Dickens opens his Cricket on the
Hearth. ... What could be further from films!... But, strange as it may seem, movies also

were boiling in that kettle.... As soon as we recognize this kettle as a typical close-up, we

exclaim:'... of course this is the purest Griffith.'... Certainly, this kettle is a typical

Griffith-esque close-up. A close-up saturated, we now become aware, with typically

Dickens-esque 'atmosphere,' with which Griffith, with equal mastery, can envelop the severe

face of life in Way Down East, and the icy cold moral face of his characters, who push the

guilty Anna onto the shifting surface of a swirling ice-break" (the white wall again).

11. Jacques Lizot, Le cercle desfeux (Paris: Seuil, 1976), pp. 34ff.
12. On the stranger grasped as Other, see Andre Haudricourt, "Nature et culture dans la

civilisation de l'igname: l'origine des clones et des clans," L'Homme vol. 4, no. 1

(January-April 1964), pp. 98-102. And Robert Jaulin, Gens de soi, gens de I'autre (Paris:

Union Generate d'Editions, 1973), preface, p. 20.

13. Maurice Ronai demonstrates that the landscape, the reality as well as the notion, is

tied to a very particular semiotic system and very particular apparatuses of power: this is one

of the sources of geography, as well as a principle behind its political subordination (the land-

scape as "the face of the fatherland or nation"). See "Paysages," in H'erodote, no. 1

(January-March 1976), pp. 125-159.

14. See Jacques Mercier, Ethiopian Magic Scrolls, trans. Richard Pevear (New York:

Braziller, 1979). And "Les peintures des rouleaux protecteurs ethiopiens," Journal of Ethio-
pian Studies, vol. 14, fasc. 2 (Summer 1974), pp. 89-106 ("The eye stands for the face which

stands for the body.... The pupils are drawn in the inner spaces.... That is why we must

534 □ NOTES TO PP. 183-197

speak of directions of magic meaning based on eyes and faces, with the use of traditional
decorative motifs such as cross-hatching, check patterns, four-pointed stars, etc."). The power
of Negus, with his ancestry going back to Solomon and his court of magicians, was based on
his ember-eyes, operating like a black hole, angelic or demonic. Mercier's analyses in their
entirety constitute an essential contribution to the analysis of facial functions.

15. For Eisenstein's own distinction between his conception of the close-up and

Griffith's, see Film Form and Film Sense.

16. This is a recurring theme in horror novels and science fiction: the eyes are in the black

hole, not the opposite ("I see a luminous disk emerging from the black hole, resembling eyes").
Comic books, Circus No. 2, for example, depict black holes populated by faces and eyes, and
the traversing of that black hole. On the relation of eyes to holes and walls, see the texts and
drawing of Jean-Luc Parant, in particular, Lesyeux MMDVI (Paris: Bourgois, 1976).

17. See Jean Paris's analyses, L'espace et le regard (Paris: Seuil, 1965), vol. 1, chapter 1

(also, the evolution of the Virgin and the variation in the relations between her face and that of
the infant Jesus: vol. 2, chapter 2).

18. D. H. Lawrence, "Melville's 'Typee' and 'Omoo,'" Studies in Classic American Litera-

ture (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923), p. 197. Lawrence's essay begins with a lovely distinc-
tion between terrestrial and maritime eyes.

19.  Miller, Tropic of Capricorn, p. 239.
20.  Ibid., p. 63.
21.  Ibid., pp. 63-64.
22.  Wilhelm Reich's Character-Analysis, trans. Theodore P. Wolfe (New York: Farrar,

Straus and Giroux, 1970), considers the face and faciality traits to be among the first pieces
of character "armor" and the first ego resistances (the "occular ring," followed by the "oral
ring"). The organization of these rings occurs on planes perpendicular to the "orgonotic
streaming" and oppose the free movement of this streaming throughout the body. Hence the
importance of eliminating the armor and "dissolving the rings." See pp. 370ff.

23. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, p. 200.
24. D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo (London: William Heinemann, 1964), p. 339.

8.1874: Three Novellas, or "What Happened?"

1. See Jules Amedee Barbey d'Aurevilly, The Diaboliques, trans. Ernest Boyd (New

York: Knopf, 1925). Of course, the work of Maupassant is not limited to tales; he also wrote
novellas, or novels containing elements of the novellas. For example, the episode of Lison in
chapter 4 of Une vie: "It was at the time of Aunt Lison's sudden impulse.... It was never spo-
ken of again, and remained as though enveloped in fog. One evening, Lise, then twenty, threw
herself into the water without anyone having an inkling why. Nothing in her life or manners,
could have allowed one to predict this act of madness."

2. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 2nd ed., trans. Laurence Scott (Austin:

University of Texas Press, 1968).

3. Marcel Arland, Le Promeneur (Paris: Pavois, 1944).
4. [

TRANS

"In the Cage," The Novels and Tales of Henry James (Fairfield, N. J.: Augustus

M. Kelley, 1979), vol. 11, p. 469.]

5. Nathalie Sarraute, in "Conversation and Sub-conversation," The Age of Suspicion,

trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Braziller, 1963), shows how Proust analyzes the smallest move-
ments, glances, or intonations. However, he apprehends them through memory, he assigns
them a "position," he thinks of them as a sequence of causes and effects; "he rarely... tried to
relive them and make them relive for the reader in the present, while they were forming and

NOTES TO PP. 197-211 □ 535

developing, like so many tiny dramas, each one of which has its adventures, its mystery and its

unforeseeable ending" (p.92).

6. [

TRANS

The French translation consulted by the authors reversed the meaning of this

passage. The original reads: "She knew at last so much that she had quite lost her earlier sense

of merely guessing. There were no different shades of distinctions—it all bounded out." In the
Cage, The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 11, p. 472.]

7. S0ren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.:

Princeton University Press, 1954), pp. 46ff.

8. [

TRANS

Scott Fitzgerald, "The Crack-up," in The Crack-up. With Other Uncollected

Pieces, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1956), p.69.]

9. [

TRANS

Ibid., pp. 82, 84.]

10. Pierrette Fleutiaux, Histoire du gouffre et de la lunette et autres nouvelles (Paris:

Jul-liard, 1976), pp. 9-50.

11. In another novella in the same collection, "Le dernier angle de transparence" (The

last angle of transparency). Fleutiaux distinguishes three lines of perception, but without

applying a preestablished schema. The hero has molar perception, which takes in overall

aggregates and clear-cut elements, well-distributed areas of fullness and emptiness (this per-

ception is coded, inherited, and overcoded by the walls: Don't miss you chair, etc.). But he

is also caught up in a molecular perception composed of fine and shifting segmentations and

autonomous traits, where holes appear in what is full and microforms in emptiness, between

two things, where everything "teems and stirs" with a thousand cracks. The hero's problem

is that he cannot make up his mind between the two lines and constantly jumps from one to

the other. Will he be saved by a third line of perception, the perception of escape, a "hypothet-

ical direction barely hinted at" by the angle of the two others, the "angle of transparency"

opening a new space?

12. Fernand Deligny, Cahiers de I'immuable, vol. 1, Voix et voir, Recherches, no. 8

(April 1975).

13. Henri Laborit wrote a book "in praise of flight," Eloge de lafuite (Paris: Laffont,

1976). In it, he demonstrates the biological importance of lines of flight among animals, but

his approach is too formalistic; among human beings, he thinks flight is associated with val-

ues of the imaginary functioning to increase one's "information" about the world.

14. [

TRANS

See pp. 188-89.]

15. Leon Shestov, Chekhov and Other Essays (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966),

pp. 8-9 [translation modified to agree with the French edition cited by the authors—Trans].

9.1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity

1. Jacques Lizot, Le cercle des Feux (Paris: Seuil, 1976), p. 118
2. Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke

Grundfest Schoeft (New York: Basic Books, 1963): "Do Dual Organizations Exist?" pp.

132-163.

3. See two exemplary studies in African Political Systems, ed. Meyer Frotes and E. E.

Evans-Pritchard (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978): Fortes, "The Political System of

the Tellensi of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast," pp. 239-271, and

Evans-Pritchard, "The Nuer of the Southern Sudan," pp. 272-296.

4. Georges Balandier analyzes the ways in which ethnologists and sociologists define

this opposition: Political Anthropology, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon,

1970), pp. 137-143.

5. On the initiation of a shaman and the role of the tree among the Yanomami Indians, see

Jacques Lizot, Le cercle des feux, pp. 127-135: "Between his legs a hole is hastily dug in

536 □ NOTES TO PP. 211-217

which they place the base of the pole they erect there. Turaewe draws imaginary lines on the

ground radiating in all directions. He says, 'These are the roots.' "

6. The State, therefore, is not defined solely by the type of public powers it has, but also

as a resonance chamber for private as well as public powers. It is for this reason that Althusser

says: "The distinction between public and private is a distinction internal to bourgeois law,

and valid in the subordinate domains where bourgeois law exercises its powers. The domain

of the State eludes it because it is beyond Law.... It is on the contrary the foundation for any

distinction between the public and the private." "Ideologie et appareils ideologiques d'Etat,"
LaPensee, no. 151 (June 1970), pp. 29-35.

7. Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mythe etpens'ee chez les Grecs (Paris: Maspero, 1971-1974), vol.

1, part 3 ("When it becomes communal, when it is erected in the public and open space of the

agora and no longer inside private residences.. . the hearth [foyer: also, focus, focal point—

Trans.] expresses the center as common denominator of all of the houses constituting the
polis"; p. 210).

8. Paul Virilio, L'insecurite du territoire (Paris: Stock, 1975), pp. 120, 174-175. On

"castrametation": "Geometry is the necessary foundation for a calculated expansion of

State power in space and time; conversely, this supplies the State with an ideal, sufficient fig-

ure, provided that the figure is ideally geometrical. . .. But Fenelon, voicing his opposition

to the State policies of Louis XIV, exclaimed: 'Beware the bewitchments and diabolical

attributes of geometry!"'

9. Meyer Fortes analyzes the difference among the Tellensi between "guardians of the

earth" and chiefs. This distinction between powers is fairly widespread among primitive soci-

eties; but the important thing is that it is organized in such a way as to prevent the powers from

resonating. For example, according to Louis Berthe's analysis of the Baduj of Java, the power

of the guardian of the earth, on the one hand, is considered to be passive and feminine but, on

the other hand, is assigned to the eldest son: this is not an "intrusion of kinship into the politi-

cal order" but on the contrary "a requirement of a political order translated in kinship terms"

in order to prevent the establishment of a resonance leading to private property. See Berthe,

"Aines et cadets, l'alliance et la hierarchie chez les Baduj," L'Homme, vol. 5, nos. 3/4

(July-December 65), pp. 189-223.

10. Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Knopf, 1976),

especially chapter 15 (Barnabas's statements [the phrase quoted is on p. 228—Trans]). The

parable of the two offices—molar and molecular—does not just have a physical interpreta-

tion, as in Eddington, but a properly bureaucratic one as well.

11. The strength of Jean-Pierre Faye's book, Langages totalitaires (Paris: Hermann,

1972), is that it illustrates the multiplicity of these focuses, both practical and semiotic, on the

basis of which Nazism was constituted. That is why Faye is the first both to do a rigorous anal-

ysis of the concept of the totalitarian State (in its Italian and German origins) and to refuse to

define Italian fascism and German Nazism by that concept (which operates on a different

plane than the "subjacent process"). Faye goes into all of these points in La critique du langage
et son economie (Paris: Galilee, 1973).

12. On the complementarity between the "macropolitics of security" and the

"micropoli-tics," see Virilio, L'insecurite du territoire, pp. 96, 130, 228-235. The

microorganization of permanent stress in large modern cities has frequently been noted.

13. Valery Giscard d'Estaing, speech of June 1, 1976, before the Institut des Hautes

Etudes de Defense Nationale (complete text in Le Monde, June 4, 1976).

14. On the "flow with mutant power" and the distinction between the two kinds of money,

see Bernard Schmitt, Monnaie, salaires et profits (Paris: Castella, 1980), pp. 236, 275-277.

15. Michel Lelart, Le dollar. Monnaie Internationale (Paris: Albatros, 1975), p. 57.

16. Take Foucault's analysis, in Discipline and Punish, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New

NOTES TO PP. 217-224 □ 537

York: Vintage, 1975), of what he calls the "microphysics of power." First, it is indeed a ques-

tion of miniaturized mechanisms, or molecular focuses operating in detail or in the infinitely

small and forming any number of "disciplines" in the school, army, factory, prison, etc. (see

pp. 138ff.). But second, these segments themselves, and the focuses operating within them at

the molecular level, present themselves as the singularities of an "abstract" diagram coexten-

sive with the entire social field, or as quanta deducted from a flow of a nonspecific nature—

the nonspecific flow being defined by "a multiplicity of individuals" to be controlled (see pp.

205ff. [translation modified]).

17. On "quantitative sinfulness," quanta, and the qualitative leap, one may refer to the

microtheology constructed by Sdren Kierkegaard in The Concept of Dread, trans. Walter

Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957).

18. According to Tarde, psychology is quantitative, but only insofar as it studies the desire

and belief components of sensation. And logic is quantitative when it does not restrict itself to

forms of representation, but extends to degrees of belief and desire, and their combinations;

see La logique sociale (Paris: Alcan, 1893).

19. On all of these points, see especially Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of

Capitalism, rev. ed. (New York: International Publishers, 1964), and Georges Duby, The
Early Growth of the European Economy: Warriors and Peasants from the Seventh to Twelfth
Century, trans. Howard E. Clarke (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974).

20. Rosa Luxemburg, in "Social Reform or Revolution," and "Mass Strike, Party and

Trade Unions," in Selected Political Writings, ed. Dick Howard (New York: Monthly Review,

1971), formulated the problem of the differences and relations between masses and classes,

but from a still-subjective point of view: masses as the "instinctual basis of class conscious-

ness" (see Nicolas Boulte and Jacques Moiroux, "Masse et Parti," Partisans, no. 45, Rose
Luxemburg vivante [December-January 1969], pp. 29-38. Alain Badiou and Francois Balmes

advance a more objective hypothesis: masses are "invariants" that oppose the State-form in

general and exploitation, whereas classes are the historical variables that determine the con-

crete State, and, in the case of the proletariat, the possibility of its effective dissolution; De
I'ideologie [Paris: Maspero, 1976]). But it is difficult to see, first of all, why masses are not

themselves historical variables, and second, why the word is applied only to the exploited (the

"peasant-plebeian" mass), when it is also suitable for seigneurial, bourgeois masses—or even

monetary masses.

21. Jules Michelet, Histoire de France au seizieme siecle in Oeuvres Completes, vol. 7, ed.

Paul Viallaneix (Paris: Flammarion, 1971-).

22. Henri Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne, trans. Bernard Miall (New York:

Norton, 1939), p. 22.

23. See Emile Felix Gautier, Genseric, roi des Vandales (Paris: Payot, 1932). ("Precisely

because they were the weakest, eternally being pushed from behind, they were forced to go

the farthest.")

24. Totalitarianism is not defined by the size of the public sector because in many cases

there is still a liberal economy. What defines it is the artificial constitution of "closed vessels,"

particularly monetary and industrial. It is primarily in this sense that Italian fascism and Ger-

man Nazism were totalitarian States, as demonstrated by Daniel Guerin in Fascism and Big
Business, trans. Frances and Mason Merrill (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1939), chapter 9.

25. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 27: "These relations go right down into the depths

of society, they are not localized in the relations between the state and its citizens or on the

frontier between classes and they do not merely reproduce... the general form of the law or

government... .They define innumerable points of confrontation, focuses of instability, each

of which has its own risks of conflict, of struggle, and of an at least temporary inversion of the

power relation."

538 □ NOTES TO PP. 225-237

26. [

TRANS

Kafka, T/ae Catffe, pp. 233, 238.]

27. On these aspects of banking power, see Suzanne de Brunhoff, L 'offre de monnaie. Cri-

tique d'un concept (Paris: Maspero, 1971), especially pp. 102-131.

28. Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1971), pp. 57-60.

29. Maurice Blanchot, L'amiti'e(Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 232.
30. F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Crack-up," in The Crack-up. With Other Uncollected Pieces,

ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1956), pp. 77-78, 81.

31. [

TRANS

See 12, "1227: Treatise on Nomadology," Proposition IX, pp. 416-423.]

32. Klaus Mann, Mephisto, trans. Robin Smith (New York: Random House, 1977), pp.

202-204. This kind of declaration abounds, at the very moment when the Nazis were succeed-
ing. See Goebbels's famous formulations: "In the world of absolute fatality in which Hitler
moves, nothing has meaning any longer, neither good nor bad, time nor space, and what other
people call success cannot be used as a criterion.... Hitler will probably end in catastrophe";
Hitler parle a ses generaux (Paris: Albin Michel, 1964). This catastrophism can be reconciled
with considerable satisfaction, good conscience and comfortable tranquillity. There is a
whole bureaucracy of catastrophe. On Italian fascism, one may consult, in particular, the
analysis of Maria-Antonietta Macciochi, "Sexualite feminine dans I'ideologie fasciste," Tel
Quel, no. 66 (Summer 1976), pp. 26-42: the women's death squad, the public display of wid-
ows and mothers in mourning, the slogan (mots d'ordre) "Coffins and Cradles."

3 3. Paul Virilio, L 'insecurity du territoire, chapter 1. Although Hannah Arendt identifies

Nazism and totalitarianism, she expressed this principle of Nazi domination: "Their idea of
domination was something that no state and no mere apparatus of violence can ever achieve,
but only a movement that is constantly kept in motion"; The Origins of Totalitarianism (New
York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), p. 326; even the war, and the danger of losing the
war, acted as accelerators (pp. 325-326, 394ff, 41 Off., 462ff).

10.1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal,

Becoming-Imperceptible

1. On the complementarity between series and structure, and how it differs from evolu-

tionism, see Henri Daudin, Cuvier et Lamarck. Les classes zoologiques et Tid'ee de serie
animale, vol. 2 of Etudes d'histoire des sciences naturelles (Paris: Alcan, 1926); and Michel

Foucault, The Order of 'Things (NewYork: Vintage, 1970).

2. See Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York:

Harper, 1962), and Gaston Bachelard, Lautr'eamont (Paris: Librairie Jose Corti, 1939).

3. Claude Levi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press,

1963), p. 78.

4. Jean-Pierre Vernant in Problemes de la guerre en Grece ancienne (Civilisations et

societes, no. 11), ed. Jean-Pierre Vernant (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), pp. 15-16.

5. On the opposition between sacrificial series and totemic structure, see Levi-Strauss,

The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 223-228. Despite all of his

severity toward the series, Levi-Strauss recognizes the compromise between the two themes:

structure itself implies a very concrete feeling for affinities (pp. 37-38) and is based on two

series between which it organizes homologies of relations. In particular,

"becoming-historical" can bring complications or degradations that replace these

homologies with resemblances and identifications between terms (see pp. 115ff., and what

Levi-Strauss calls the "flipside of totemism").

6. Jean Duvignaud, L'anomie. Heresie et Subversion (Paris: Ed. Anthropos, 1973).

NOTES TO PP. 240-247 □ 539

7. [

TRANS

H. P. Lovecraft, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key," in The Dream-Quest

of Unknown Kadath (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), pp. 191-192.]

8. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Lettres du voyageur a son retour, trans. Jean-Claude

Schneider (Paris: Mercure de France, 1969), letter of May 9, 1901.

9. A nton Reiser (extracts) in La legende dispers'ee. A nthologie du romantisme allemand

(Paris: Union Generate d'Editions, 1976), pp. 36-43.

10. [

TRANS

A Universal History of Infamy, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (New

York: Dutton, 1972); Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero, Manual de zoolog'ia
fantastica (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1957), p. 9. The lobizbn is a fantastic

creature of Uruguayan folklore to which many shapes are attributed.]

11. On the man of war, his extrinsic position in relation to the State, the family, and reli-

gion, and on the becomings-animal, becomings-wild animal he enters into, see Dumezil, in

particular, Mythes et dieux des Germains (Paris: E. Leroux, 1939); Horace et les Curiaces

(Paris: Gallimard, 1942); The Destiny of the Warrior, trans. Alf Hiltebeital (Chicago: Univer-

sity of Chicago Press, 1970); Mythe et epopee (Paris: Gallimard, 1968-1973), vol. 2. One may

also refer to the studies on leopard-man societies, etc., in Black Africa; it is probable that these

societies derive from brotherhoods of warriors. But after the colonial State prohibited tribal

wars, they turned into crime associations, while still retaining their territorial and political

importance. One of the best studies on this subject is Paul Ernest Joset, Les societes secretes
des hommes-Teopards en Afrique noire (Paris: Payot, 1955). The becomings-animal proper to

these groups seem to us to be very different from the symbolic relations between human and

animal as they appear in State apparatuses, but also in pre-State institutions of the totemism

type. Levi-Strauss clearly demonstrates that totemism already implies a kind of embryonic

State, to the extent that it exceeds tribal boundaries (The Savage Mind, pp. 157ff.).

12. [

TRANS

Kafka, "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk," in The Complete Stories of

Franz Kafka, ed. Nahum N. Glazer (New York: Schocken, 1983).]

13. Georges Canguilhem, On the Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R.

Fawcett, intro. Michel Foucault (Boston: Reidel, 1978), pp. 73-74.

14. D. H. Lawrence: "I am tired of being told there is no such animal.... If I am a giraffe,

and the ordinary Englishmen who write about me and say they know me are nice well-behaved

dogs, there it is, the animals are different.... You don't love me. The animal that I am you

instinctively dislike"; The Collected Letters ofD. H. Lawrence, vol. 2, ed. Harry T. Moore

(New York: Viking, 1962), letter to J. M. Murry, May 20, 1929, p. 1154.

15. [

TRANS

Herman Melville, Moby Dick, chapter 36, "The Quarter-Deck."]

16. Rene Thorn, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis, trans. D. H. Fowler (Reading,

Mass.: Benjamin Fowler/Cummings, 1975), p. 319.

17. Edward Leach, Rethinking Anthropology (New York: Humanities Press, 1971),

pp. 18-25.

18. [

TRANS

Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian, Hugues-le-loup (Paris: J.

Bonaventure, n.d.).]

19. [

TRANS

Leach, Rethinking Anthropology, p. 18.]

20. See Jacques Lacarriere, Les hommes ivres de dieu (Paris: Fayard, 1975).

21. Pierre Gordon, in Sex and Religion, trans. Renee and Hilda Spodheim (New York:

Social Science Publishers, 1949), studied the role of animal-men in rites of "sacred

defloration." These animal-men impose a ritual alliance upon filiative groups, themselves

belong to brotherhoods that are on the outside or on the fringes, and are masters of contagion

and epidemic. Gordon analyzes the reaction of the villages and cities when they begin to fight

the animal-men in order to win the right to perform their own initiations and order their alli-

ances according to their respective filiations (for example, the fight against the dragon). We

find the same theme, for example, in Genevieve Calame-Griaule and Z. Ligers, "L'homme-

540 □ NOTES TO PP. 247-261

hyene dans la tradition soudanaise," L'Homme, 1, 2 (May-August 1961), pp. 89-118: the

hyena-man lives on the fringes of the village, or between two villages, and can keep a lookout

in both directions. A hero, or even two heroes with a fiancee in each other's village, triumphs

over the man-animal. It is as though it were necessary to distinguish two very different states

of alliance: a demonic alliance that imposes itself from without, and imposes its law upon all

of the filiations (a forced alliance with the monster, with the man-animal), and a consensual

alliance, which is on the contrary in conformity with the law of filiations and is established

after the men of the villages have defeated the monster and have organized their own rela-

tions. This sheds new light on the question of incest. For it is not enough to say that the prohi-

bition against incest results from the positive requirements of alliance in general. There is

instead a kind of alliance that is so foreign and hostile to filiation that it necessarily takes the

position of incest (the man-animal always has a relation to incest). The second kind of alliance

prohibits incest because it can subordinate itself to the rights of filiation only by lodging itself,

precisely, between two distinct filiations. Incest appears twice, once as a monstrous power of

alliance when alliance overturns filiation, and again as a prohibited power of filiation when

filiation subordinates alliance and must distribute it among distinct lineages.

22. [

TRANS

See Fitzgerald, "The Crack-up," in The Crack-up. With Other Uncollected

Pieces, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1956). The allusion to Faust is to

Goethe, Faust, Part I, lines 1323-1324.]

23. Richard Matheson and Isaac Asimov are of particular importance in this evolution

(Asimov extensively develops the theme of symbiosis).

24. Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), p. 159.

25. [

TRANS

Lovecraft, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key," p. 197.]

26. See D. H. Lawrence, the first and second poems of Tortoises (New York: T.

Selzer, 1921).

27. [

TRANS

Virginia Woolf, The Waves (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1931),

p. 139.]

28. See the Inquisition manual, Le marteau des sorciers (1486), ed. H. Institoris and J.

Sprengler (Paris: Plon, 1973), vol. l,p. 10,andvol. 2, p. 8. The first and simplest case is that of

Ulysses' companions, who believed themselves, and were believed to have been, transformed

into pigs (or again, King Nebuchadnezzar, transformed into an ox). The second case is more

complicated: Diomedes' companions do not believe they have been changed into birds, since

they are dead, but demons take over birds' bodies and pass them off as those of Diomedes'

companions. The need to distinguish this more complex case is explained by phenomena of

transfer of affects; for example, a lord on a hunting excursion cuts off the paw of a wolf and

returns home to find his wife, who had not left the house, with a hand cut off; or a man strikes

cats, and the exact wounds he inflicts turn up on women.

29. On the problem of intensities in the Middle Ages, the proliferation of theses on this

topic, the constitution of kinetics and dynamics, and the particularly important role of

Nicholas Oresme, see Pierre Duhem's classic work, Le systeme du monde (Paris: A. Hermann

& Fils, 1913-1959), vols. 7-9 (La physiqueparisienne au XlVesiecle).

30. Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Principes dephilosophie zoologique(Paris: Picton et

Didier, 1930). And on particles and their movements, Notions synth'etiques, historiques et
physiologiques de philosophie naturelle (Paris: Denain, 1838).

31. Vladimir Slepian, "Fils de chien," Minuit, no. 7 (January 1974). We have given a

very simplified presentation of this text.

32. See Roger Dupouy, "Du masochisme," Annales M'edico-psychologiques, series 12,

vol. 2 (1929), p. 405.

33. This is sometimes written "eccei ty," deriving the word from ecce, "here is." This is an

error, since Duns Scotus created the word and the concept from haec, "this thing." But it is a

NOTES TO PP. 261-265 □ 541

fruitful error because it suggests a mode of individuation that is distinct from that of a thing or

a subject.

34. Michel Tournier, Les meteores (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), chapter 23, "L'ame deployee."

35. [

TRANS

On Aeon versus chronos, see Deleuze, Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit, 1969),

especially series 23, pp. 190-197.]

36. Pierre Boulez, Conversations with Celestin Deliege (London: Eulenberg Books,

1976), pp. 68-71 ("It is not possible to introduce phenomena of tempo into music that has

been calculated only electronically, in ... lengths expressed in seconds or microseconds"; p.

70).

37. Ray Bradbury, The Machineries of Joy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964), p. 53.

38. [

TRANS

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt Brace and World,

1925), p. 11.]

39. Gustave Guillaume has proposed a very interesting conception of the verb. He dis-

tinguishes between an interior time, enveloped in the "process," and an exterior time per-

taining to the distinction between epochs (Epoques et niveaux temporels dans lesysteme de
la conjugaisonfrancaise, Cahiers de linguistique structurale [Universite de Laval, Quebec],

no. 4 [1955]). It seems to us that these two poles correspond respectively to the

infinitive-becoming, Aeon, and the present-being, Chronos. Each verb leans more or less in

the direction of one pole or the other, not only according to its nature, but also according

to the nuances of its modes and tenses, with the exception of "becoming" and "being,"

which correspond to both poles. Proust, in his study of Flaubert's style, shows how the

imperfect tense in Flaubert takes on the value of an infinitive-becoming: Chroniques

(Paris: Gallimard, 1927), pp. 197-199.]

40. On the problem of proper names (in what sense is the proper name outside the limits

of classification and of another nature, and in what sense is it at the limit and still a part of

classification?), see Alan Henderson Gardiner, The Theory of Proper Names, 2nd ed. (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1957), and Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, chapter 7 ("Time

Regained"), pp. 217-244.

41. We have already encountered this problem of the indifference of psychoanalysis to

the use of the indefinite article or pronoun among children: as early as Freud, but more espe-

cially in Melanie Klein (the children she analyzes, in particular, Little Richard, speak in terms

of "a," "one," "people," but Klein exerts incredible pressure to turn them into personal and

possessive family locutions). It seems to us that Laplanche and Pontalis are the only ones in

psychoanalysis to have had any inkling that indefinites play a specific role; they protested

against any overrapid interpretive reduction: "Fantasme originaire," Les temps modernes,

no. 215 (April 1964), pp. 1861, 1868.

42. See the subjectivist or personalist conception of language in Emile Benveniste, Prob-

lems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of

Miami Press, 1971), chapters 20 ("Subjectivity in Language," pp. 223-230) and 21 ("Analyti-

cal Philosophy and Language," pp. 231-238), especially pp. 220-221 and 225-226.

43. The essential texts of Maurice Blanchot serve to refute the theory of the "shifter" and

of personology in linguistics. See L'entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), pp. 556-567.

And on the difference between the two propositions, "I am unfortunate" and "he is unfortu-

nate," or between "I die" and "one dies," see La part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), pp.

29-30, and The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,

1982), pp. 90, 122, 126. Blanchot demonstrates that in all of these cases the indefinite has

nothing to do with "the banality of daily life," which on the contrary would be on the side of

the personal pronoun.

44. [

TRANS

These quotes, the first from Nietzsche, the second from Kafka, are quoted

more fully in 12, "1227: Treatise on Nomadology," p. 353.]

542 □ NOTES TO PP. 265-274

45. For example, Francois Cheng, Chinese Poetic Writing, trans. Donald A. Riggs and

Jerome P. Seaton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), his analysis of what he calls

"the passive procedures," pp. 23-42.

46. See the statements of the "repetitive" American musicians, particularly Steve Reich

and Philip Glass.

47. Nathalie Sarraute, in The Age of Suspicion, trans. Marie Jolas (New York: Braziller,

1963), shows how Proust, for example, is torn between the two planes, in that he extracts from

his characters "the infinitesimal particles of an impalpable matter," but also glues all of the

particles back into a coherent form, slips them into the envelope of this or that character. See

pp. 50, 94-95.

48. See the distinction between the two Planes in Artaud. One of them is denounced as

the source of all illusions: The Peyote Dance (translation of Las Tarahumaras), trans. Helen

Weaver (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), pp. 12-13.

49. Robert Rovini, introduction to Friedrich Holderlin, Hyperion (Paris: 10/18,1968).

50. We have referred to an unpublished study of Kleist by Mathieu Carriere.

51. "Where did the title of your second book, A Year From Monday, come from?" "From

a plan a group of friends and I made to meet each other again in Mexico 'a year from next

Monday.' We were together on a Saturday. And we were never able to fulfil that plan. It's a

form of silence.... The very fact that our plan failed, the fact we were unable to meet does not

mean that everything failed. The plan wasn't a failure"; John Cage and Daniel Charles, For the
Birds (Boston: Marion Boyers, 1981), pp. 116-117.

52. That is why we were able to take Goethe as an example of a transcendental plane.

Goethe, however, passes for a Spinozist; his botanical and zoological studies uncover an

immanent plane of composition, which allies him to Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire (this resem-

blance has often been pointed out). Nonetheless, Goethe retains the twofold idea of a devel-

opment of form and a formation-education of the Subject; for this reason, his plane of

immanence has already crossed over to the other side, to the other pole.

53. On all of these points (proliferations-dissolutions, accumulations, indications of

speed, the affective and dynamic role), see Pierre Boulez, Conversations with Celestin
Deliege, pp. 21-22, 68-71. In another text, Boulez stresses a little-known aspect of Wagner:

not only are the leitmotifs freed from their subordination to the scenic characters, but the

speeds of development are freed from the hold of a "formal code" or a tempo ("Le temps

re-cherche," in Das Rheingold Programmheft, vol. I [Bayreuth, 1976], pp. 3-11). Boulez

pays homage to Proust for being one of the first to understand this floating and

transformable role of Wagnerian motifs.

54. The themes of speed and slowness are most extensively developed in The Captive:

"To understand the emotions which they arouse, and which others even better-looking do not,

we must realise that they are not immobile, but in motion, and add to their person a sign corre-

sponding to that which in physics denotes speed... to such beings, such fugitive beings, their

own nature and our anxiety fasten wings"; vol. 3 oi Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K.

Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor (New York: Random House, 1981), pp.

86-87, 88.

55. [

TRANS

The word translated as "proximity" is voisinage, which Deleuze and Guattari

draw from set theory. The corresponding mathematical term in English is "neighborhood."]

56. Louis Wolfson, Leschizo et les langues, preface by Gilles Deleuze (Paris: Gallimard,

1970).

57. Rene Scherer and Guy Hocquenghem, Co-ire, Recherche, no. 22 (1976), pp. 76-82:

see their critique of Bettelheim's thesis, which considers the becomings-animal of the child

merely an autistic symbolism that expresses the anxiety of the parents more than any reality

of the child. See Bruno Bettelheim, The Empty Fortress (New York: Free Press, 1967).

NOTES TO PP. 274-287 □ 543

58. Philippe Gavi, "Les philosophes du fantastique," Liberation, March 31, 1977. For

the preceding cases, what we must arrive at is an understanding of certain so-called neurotic

behaviors as a function of becomings-animal, instead of relegating becomings-animal to a

psychoanalytic interpretation of behaviors. We saw this in relation to masochism (and Lolito

explains that the origin of his feats lies in certain masochistic experiences; a fine text by Chris-

tian Maurel conjugates a becoming-monkey and a becoming-horse in a masochistic pairing).

Anorexia would also have to be understood from the point of view of becoming-animal.

59. See Newsweek, May 16, 1977, p. 57.
60. See Trost, Visible et invisible (Paris: Arcanes) and Librement m'ecanique (Paris:

Minotaure): "She was simultaneously, in her sensible reality and in the ideal prolongation of

her lines, like the projection of a human group yet to come."

61. See the examples of structural explanation proposed by Jean-Pierre Vernant, in

Problemes de la guerre en Grece ancienne, pp. 15-16.

62. On transvestism in primitive societies, see Bruno Bettelheim (who offers an

identificatory psychological interpretation), Symbolic Wounds (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press,

1954), and especially Gregory Bateson (who proposes an original structural interpretation),
Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New
Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of Views, 2nd ed. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univer-

sity Press, 1958).

63. Francois Cheng, Chinese Poetic Writing, p. 13.

64. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth Press, 1980),

vol. 3, p. 209: "The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every

atom." On all of these points, we make use of an unpublished study on Virginia Woolf by

Fanny Zavin.

65. [

TRANS

Sdren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton,

N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954), p. 104.]

66. Ibid., .p. 49. Fear and Trembling seems to us to be Kierkegaard's greatest book

because of the way it formulates the problem of movement and speed, not only in its content,

but also in its'style and composition.

67. [

TRANS

Fear and Trembling, p. 61.]

68. Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), pp. 297ff.
69. Leslie Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American (New York: Stein and Day,

1968). Fiedler explains the secret alliance of the white American with the black or the Indian

by a desire to escape the molar form and ascendancy of the American woman.

70. Henri Michaux, Miserable Miracle: Mescaline, trans. Louise Varese (San Francisco:

City Lights, 1963), p. 87: "The horror of it was that I was nothing but a line. In normal life one

is a sphere, a sphere that surveys panoramas.... Now only a line... the accelerated line I had

become." See Michaux's line drawings. In the first eighty pages of The Major Ordeals of the
Mind, and the Countless Minor Ones, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich, 1974), Michaux further develops the analysis of speeds, molecular perceptions,

and "microphenomena" or "microoperations."

71. [

TRANS

A rewriting of Freud's famous phrase, "Where id was, there ego shall be"

(New Introductory Lectures, Standard Edition, vol. 22, p. 80), and Lacan's earlier rewriting of

it in "The Freudian Thing," Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp.

128-129,136.]

72. Artaud, The Peyote Dance, pp. 12-14.

73. Michaux, Miserable Miracle ("Remaining Master of One's Speeds," pp. 87-88).

74. On the possibilities of silicon, and its relation to carbon from the point of view of

organic chemistry, see the article, "Silicium," in the Encyclopedia Universalis.

75. Luc de Heusch shows that it is the man of war who brings the secret: he thinks, eats,

544 □ NOTES TO PP. 287-293

loves, judges, arrives in secret, while the man of the State proceeds publicly. See Le roi ivre ou
I'origine de VEtat (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). The idea of the State secret is a late one and
assumes that the war machine has been appropriated by the State apparatus.

76. In particular, Georg Simmel. See The Sociology ofGeorg Simmel, trans. Kurt H.

Wolff (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1950), chapter 3.

77. Paul Ernest Joset clearly notes these two aspects of the secret initiatory society, the

Mambela of the Congo: on the one hand, its relation of influence over the traditional political
leaders, which gets to the point of a transfer of social powers; and on the other hand, its de
facto relation with the Anioto, as a secret hindsociety of crime or leopard-men (even if the
Anioto are of another origin than the Mambela). See Les societes secretes des
hommes-leopards en Afrique noire, chapter 5.

78. On the psychoanalytic conceptions of the secret, see Du secret, Nouvelle revue de

psychanalyse, no. 14 (Fall 1976); and for the evolution of Freud on this subject, the article by
Claude Girard, "Le secret aux origines," pp. 55-83.

79. Bernard Pingaud shows, on the basis of the exemplary text of Henry James, "The

Figure in the Carpet" [The Novels and Tales of Henry James (New York: C. Scribner's Sons,
1907-1917), vol. 15—Trans.], how the secret jumps from content to form, and escapes both:
Du secret, pp. 247-249. This text has been frequently commented upon from the viewpoint of
psychoanalysis; above all, J.-B. Pontalis, Apres Freud (Paris: Gallimard, 1968). But psycho-
analysis remains prisoner to a necessarily disguised content and a necessarily symbolic form
(structure, absent cause ...), at a level that defines both the unconscious and language. That is
why, in its aesthetic or literary applications, it misses the secret in an author, as well as the
secret ojan author. The same goes for the secret of Oedipus: they concern themselves with the
first two kinds of secret but not with the second, which is nevertheless the most important.

80. On the fogginess of the idea of majority, see Kenneth Arrow's two famous themes,

"the Condorcet effect" and the "theorem of collective decision."

81. See William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (New York: Vintage, 1948), p. 216. Speak-

ing of Southern whites after the Civil War (not only the poor but also the old monied families),
Faulkner writes, "We are in the position of the German after 1933 who had no other alterna-
tive but to be a Nazi or a Jew."

82. The subordination of the line to the point is clearly evident in the arborescent

schemas: see Julien Pacotte, Le reseau arborescent, scheme primordial de la pensee (Paris:
Hermann, 1936), and the status of centered or hierarchical systems according to Pierre
Rosenthiehl and Jean Petitot, "Automate asocial et systemes acentres," Communications, no.
22 (1974), pp. 45-62. The arborescent schema of majority could be presented as follows:

83. A line of becoming, in relation to the localizable connection of A and B (distance), or

in relation to their contiguity:

NOTES TO PP. 293-298 D 545

A «... -_« B

4»B

84. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, p. 236 (Wednesday, November 28, 1928). The

same thing applies to the works of Kafka, in which childhood blocks function as the opposite
of childhood memories. Proust's case is more complicated because he performs a mixture of
the two. The situation of the psychoanalyst is to grasp memories or phantasies, but never
childhood blocks.

85. For example, in the system of memory, the formation of a memory implies a diago-

nal that turns present A into representation A' in relation to the new present B, and into A" in
relation to C, etc.:

order of time

See Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, ed. Martin

Heidegger, trans. James S. Churchill, intro. Calvin O. Schrag (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-

sity Press, 1964), pp. 48-50.

86. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1983), "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,"

sec. 1, pp. 63-64.

87. On all of these themes, see Pierre Boulez. (1) On how transversals always tend to

escape horizontal and vertical coordinates of music, sometimes even drawing "virtual lines,"

see Notes of an Apprenticeship, ed. Paule Thevenin, trans. Robert Weinstock (New York:

Knopf, 1968), pp. 231 -232,295-301,382-383. (2) On the idea of the sound block or "block of

duration," in relation to this transversal, see Boulez on Music Today, trans. Susan Bradshaw

and Richard Bennett (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 55-59. (3) On

the distinction between points and blocks, "punctual sets," and "aggregative sets" with vary-

ing individuality, see "Sonate que me veux-tu?", Mediations, no. 7 (1964). The hatred of

memory appears frequently in Boulez; see "Eloge de l'amnesie," Musique enjeu, no. 4 (1971),

pp. 5-14, and "J'ai horreur du souvenir," in Roger Desormiere et son temps, ed. Denise Mayer

and Pierre Souvtchinsky (Monaco: Ed. du Rocher, 1966). Confining ourselves to contempo-

rary examples, one finds analogous declarations in Stravinsky, Cage, Berio. Of course, there is

a musical memory that is tied to coordinates and is exercised in social settings (getting up,

going to bed, beating a retreat). But the perception of a musical "phrase" appeals less to mem-

ory, even of the reminiscence type, than to an extension or contraction of perception of the

encounter type. It should be studied how each musician sets in motion veritable blocks of for-
getting: for example, what Jean Barraque calls "slices of forgetting" and "absent develop-

ments" in the work of Debussy; Debussy (Paris: Seuil, 1977), pp. 169-171. One can refer to a

general study by Daniel Charles, "La musique etl'oubli," Traverses, no. 4 (1977), pp. 14-23.

88. Roland Barthes, "Rasch," in The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard

(New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), pp. 300-302, 308-309.

89. There are many differences among painters, in all respects, but also a common

546 □

NOTES TO PP. 298-305

movement: see Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane in vol. 2 of Complete Writings on
Art, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), pp. 524-700; and Paul
Klee, On Modern Art, trans. Paul Findlay, intro. Herbert Reed (London: Faber, 1966). The
aim of statements like those of Mondrian on the exclusive value of the vertical and the hori-
zontal is to show the conditions under which the vertical and horizontal are sufficient to cre-
ate a transversal, which does not even have to be drawn; for example, coordinates of unequal
thickness intersect inside the frame and extend outside the frame, opening a "dynamic axis"
running transversally (see Michel Butor's comments in Repertoire [Paris: Minuit, 1960- ], vol.
3, "Le carre et son habitant"). One can also consult Michel Fried's article on Pollock's line,
Three American Painters (Cambridge, Mass.: Fogg Art Museum, 1965), and Henry Miller's
discussion of Nash's line, On Turning Eighty (London: Village Press, 1973).

90. "There was something tense, exasperated to the point of intolerable anger, in his

good-humored breast, as he played the finely-spun peace-music. The more exquisite the
music, the more perfectly he produced it, in sheer bliss; and at the same time, the more intense
was the maddened exasperation within him"; D. H. Lawrence, Aaron's Rod (New York:
Thomas Seltzer, 1922), p. 16.

91. Although Luciano Berio indicates otherwise, it seems to us that his work, Visage, is

composed according to the three states of faciality: first, a multiplicity of sound bodies and
silhouettes, then a short symphonic and dominant organization of the face, and finally a
launching of probe-heads in all directions. However, there is no question here of music "imi-
tating" the face and its avatars, or of the voice constituting a metaphor. Instead, the sounds
accelerate the deterritorialization of the face, giving it a properly acoustical power, and the
face reacts musically by in turn inducing a deterritorialization of the voice. This is a molecu-
lar face, produced by electronic music. The voice precedes the face, itself forms the face for
an instant, and outlives it, increasing in speed—on the condition that it is unarticulated,
asignifying, asubjective.

92. Will Grohman, Paul Klee (New York: Harry N. Abrams, n.d.): "Somewhat paradoxi-

cally he remarked that perhaps it had been his good fortune to develop painting, at least on the
formal plane, to the stage reached in music by Mozart" (p. 71).

93. Dominique Fernandez, La rose des Tudors (Paris: Julliard, 1976) (and the novel

Porporino [Paris: Grasset, 1974]). Fernandez cites pop music as a timid return to great English
vocal music. It would be necessary to take into consideration techniques of circular breathing,
in which one sings breathing in as well as out, or of sound filtering using zones of resonance
(nose, forehead, cheekbones—a properly musical use of the face).

94. Marcel More, Le dieu Mozart et le monde des oiseaux (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).
95. As we have seen, imitation can be conceived either as a resemblance of terms culmi-

nating in an archetype (series), or as a correspondence of relations constituting a symbolic
order (structure); but becoming is not reducible to either of these. The concept of mimesis is
not only inadequate, it is radically false.

96. Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967): "I took the dra-

matic licence of not having the birds scream at all" (p. 224).

97. See Ernesto de Martino, La terredu remords (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), pp. 142-170.

Martino, however, retains an interpretation based on the archetype, imitation, and
identification.

98. Jean Claude Larouche, Alexis le trotteur (Montreal: Ed. du Jour, 1971). They quote

this account: "He didn't play music with his mouth like one of us; he had a huge harmonica we
couldn't even play. ... When he played with us, he would decide all of a sudden to double us.
In other words, he doubled the beat; in the time we played one beat, he played two, which
required extraordinary wind" (p. 95).

NOTES TO PP. 306-315 □ 547

99. [

TRANS

See Kafka, The Castle, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Knopf,

1976).]

100. [

TRANS

See 7, "Year Zero: Faciality," pp. 167-191.]

101. Andre Tetry, Les outils chez les etres vivants (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), the chapter on

"musical instruments," with bibliography. An animal's movement or labor may make noise,
but we speak of a musical instrument whenever animals use apparatuses whose sole function
is to produce various sounds (the musical character, to the extent that it is determinable, is
quite variable, as is the case with the vocal apparatus of birds; there are veritable virtuosos
among insects). From this standpoint, we distinguish: (1) stridulatory apparatuses, of the
stringed instrument type: the rubbing of a rigid surface against another surface (insects, crus-
taceans, spiders, scorpions, pedipalps); (2) percussive apparatuses, of the drum, cymbal, or
xylophone type: direct application of muscles to a vibratory membrane (crickets and certain
fish). Not only is there an infinite variety of apparatuses and sounds, but the same animal
varies its rhythm, tonality, intensity according to still more mysterious urgencies. "It then be-
comes a song of anger, anxiety, fear, triumph, love. When there is keen excitation, the rhythm
of the stridulation varies: in Crioceris lilii, the frequency of the rubbing goes from 228 strokes
per minute to 550 or more."

102. Gisele Brelet, "Musique contemporaine en France," in Histoire de la musique, ed.

Roland Manuel, "Pleiade" (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), vol. 2, pp. 1166.

103. A text by Henry Miller for Varese, The Air-ConditionedNightmare (New York: New

Directions, 1945), pp. 176-177.

11.1837: Of the Refrain

1. Fernand Deligny, Voix et Voir, Recherches, no. 8 (April 1975), on the way in which,

among autistic children, a "line of drift" deviates from the customary path and begins to
"vibrate," "toss about," "yaw."

2. Paul Klee, On Modern Art, trans. Paul Findlay, intro. Herbert Reed (London: Faber,

1966), p. 43 [translation modified to agree with the French version cited by the authors]. See
Henri Maldiney's comments in Regard, parole, espace (Lausanne: L'Age d'homme, 1973),
pp. 149-151.

3. On the musical nome, the ethos, and the ground or land, notably in polyphony, see

Joseph Samson in Histoire de la musique, ed. Roland Manuel (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), vol.
2, pp. 1168-1172. One may also refer to the role in Arab music of the "maqam," which is
both a modal type and a melodic formula: Simon Jargy, La musique arabe (Paris: PUF,
1971), pp. 55ff.

4. Gaston Bachelard, La dialectique de la dur'ee (Paris: Bovin, 1936), pp. 128-129.

Emphasis added.

5. Jakob Johann von Uexkiill, Mondesanimauxet mondehumain (Paris: Gonthier, 1965).
6. "Their glorious dress is constant.... The coloring of coral fish is distributed in large,

sharply contrasting areas of the body. This is quite different from the color patterns not only
of most fresh-water fish but of nearly all less aggressive and less territorial fish.... Like the
colors of the coral fish, the song of the nightingale signals from a distance to all members of its
species that a territory has found an owner." Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, trans. Marjorie
Kerr Wilson (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), pp. 19-20.

7. Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Ethology, trans. Erich Klinghammer (New York: Holt,

Rinehart and Winston, 1975): on monkeys, p. 487; on rabbits, p. 346; on birds, p. 171: "Zebra
finches with colorful plumage maintain a certain distance from one another, while all-white
birds of the same species perch much closer together."

548 D NOTES TO PP. 315-325

8. W. H. Thorpe, Learning and Instinct in Animals (London: Methuen, 1956), p. 364

(Fig. 2).

9. Lorenz has a constant tendency to present territoriality as an effect of intraspecific

aggression; see On Agression, pp. 38-39, 42-43, 53-54, 161-162.

10. On the aesthetic and vital primacy of "having," see Gabriel Tarde, L'opposition

universelle (Paris: Alcan, 1897).

11. Details on Messiaen's conceptions of bird song, his evaluation of its aesthetic quali-

ties, and his methods for both reproducing it and using it as a material are to be found in

Claude Samuel, Conversations with Olivier Messiaen, trans. Felix Aprahamian (London:

Stainer and Bell, 1976), and in Antoine Golea, Rencontres avec Olivier Messiaen (Paris:

Julliard, 1961). In particular, on why Messiaen does not use a tape recorder or sonograph as

ornithologists usually do, see Samuel, pp. 61-63.

12. [

TRANS

Lorenz, On Aggression, p. 87.]

13. On all of these points, see Claude Samuel, Conversations, chapter 4. On the "rhythmic

character," see pp. 36-39.

14. Pierre Boulez, "Le temps re-cherche," in Das Rheingold Programmheft, vol. 1

(Bayreuth, 1976), pp. 5-15.

15. [

TRANS

Proust, The Captive, vol. 3 of Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott

Moncrief, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor (New York: Random House, 1981), p. 156.

Translation modified.]

16. On mannerism and chaos, baroque dances, and the relation of schizophrenia to man-

nerism and dance, see Evelyne Sznycer, "Droit de suite baroque," in Schizophrenic et art, ed.

Leo Navratil (Paris: Ed. Complexe, 1978).

17. Lorenz, On Aggression, pp. 39-40. On the three rhythmic personages defined respec-

tively as active, passive, and witness, see Messiaen and Golea, Rencontres, pp. 90-91.

18. [

TRANS

Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed

(New York: World, 1963), pp. 242-243.]

19. [

TRANS

This "close embrace" of energies recalls Proust's description of Vinteuil's little

phrase; The Captive, p. 262.]

20. On "the primary intuition of the earth as a religious form" (p. 242), see Eliade, Pat-

terns in Comparative Religion, pp. 245ff.; on the center of the territory, see pp. 374ff. Eliade

makes it clear that the center is simultaneously outside the territory, very difficult to attain,

and inside the territory, within our immediate reach.

21. Biologists have often made a distinction between two factors of transformation: those

of the mutation type, and processes of isolation or separation, which may be genetic, geo-

graphical, or even psychical. Territoriality would be a factor of the second type. See Lucien

Cuenot, L'espece(Paris: G. Doin, 1936).

22. Paul Geroudet, Lespassereaux, 3 vols. (Paris: Delachaux et Niestle, 1951-1957), vol.

2, pp. 88-94.

23. In On Aggression, Lorenz makes a clear distinction between "anonymous flocks" such

as schools of fish, which form milieu blocks; "local groups," where recognition occurs only

inside the territory and, at its strongest, between "neighbors"; and finally, societies founded

on an autonomous "bond."

24. K. Immelmann, Beitr'age zu einer vergleichenden Biologie australischer Prachtfinken,

Zoologische Jahrbucher; Abteilung fur Systematik, Okologie und Geographic de Tiere, 90

(1962).

25. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Ethology, p. 225: "Carrying nesting material for nest building evolved

into the male courtship actions using grass stems. This was again secondarily reduced in some

species and became rudimentary, while at the same time the song, which originally served the

function of staking out a territory, also underwent a change in function. These animals are gre-

NOTES TO PP. 325-329 D 549

garious and are not really territorial. Instead of courting with grass stems, these males sing

softly while sitting next to the females." Eibl-Eibesfeldt, however, interprets the grass-stem

behavior as a vestige.

26. See L'Odyss'ee sous-marine de I'equipe Cousteau, film no. 36, La marche des

langoustes (L. R. A.), commentary by Cousteau-Diole: spiny lobsters along the northern coast

of the Yucatan Peninsula sometimes leave their territories. They assemble, at first in small

groups, before the first winter storm, and before any sign detectable by human instruments.

When the storm comes, they form long march processions, in single file, with a leader that is

periodically relieved and a rearguard (the speed of the march is five-eighths of a mile per hour,

for sixty miles or more). This migration does not seem to be associated with egg laying, which

does not take place until six months later. Hernnkind, a lobster specialist, hypothesizes that

this is a "vestige" from the last ice age (more than 10,000 years ago). Cousteau leans toward a

more current interpretation, even mentioning the possibility that it is a premonition of a new

ice age. The factual issue is that in this exceptional case the lobsters' territorial assemblage

opens onto a social assemblage, and that this social assemblage is connected to cosmic forces,

or, as Cousteau says, "pulsations of the earth." But "the enigma remains entirely unsolved,"

all the more so because this lobster procession occasions a slaughter by fishermen, and also

because lobsters cannot be tagged since they shed their shells.

27. The best book of nursery rhymes, and on nursery rhymes, seems to be Les complines

de langue francaise, with the commentary by editors Jean Beaucomot, Franck Guibat, et al.

(Paris: Seghers, 1970). The territorial character of nursery rhymes appears in such privileged

examples as "Pimpanicaille," two distinct versions of which exist in Gruyeres on "the two

sides of the street" (pp. 27-28); but it is a nursery rhyme in the strict sense only when there is a

distribution of specialized roles in a game, and the formation of an autonomous game assem-

blage that reorganizes the territory.

28. Nikolaas Tinbergen, The Study of Instinct (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1969).

29. On the one hand, the experiments of W. R. Hess have shown that there is not a cere-

bral center but instead points that are concentrated in one zone and disseminated in another,

and are capable of inciting the same effect; conversely, the effect may change according to the

duration and intensity of the excitation of a point. On the other hand, E. von Hoist's experi-

ments on "deafferented" fish demonstrate the importance of central nervous coordination in

fin rhythms; Tinbergen's schema takes these interactions into account only secondarily. The

hypothesis of a "population of oscillators" or a "pack of oscillating molecules" forming sys-

tems of articulation from the inside, independent of any common measure, is most compel-

ling in view of the problem of circadian rhythms. See A. Reinberg, "La chronobiologie,"
Sciences, vol. 1(1970); and T. van den Dreissche and A. Reinberg, "Rythmes biologiques," in
Encyclopedia Universalis, vol. 14, p. 572: "It does not seem possible to reduce the mechanism

of circadian rhythmicity to a simple sequence of elementary processes."

30. Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Vin-

tage, 1972): on indirect interactions and their nonlinear character, pp. 69-71 and 76-77; on

corresponding molecules that are least two-headed, pp. 68-69; on the inhibiting or releasing

character of these interactions, pp. 63-67. Circadian rhythms also depend on these character-

istics (see the chart in the Encyclopedia Universalis under "Rhythmes biologiques").

31. Eugene Dupreel elaborated a set of original notions, "consistency" (in relation to

"precariousness"), "consolidation," "interval," "intercalation." See Theorie de la consolida-
tion: La cause et I'intervalle (Brussels: M. Lamertin, 1933); La consistance et la probabilite
objective (Brussels: Academie Royale de Belgique, 1961); Esquisse d'une philosophic des
valeurs (Paris: Alcan, 1939); Bachelard, in La dialectique de la dur'ee, draws on Dupreel.

32. [

TRANS

The Diary of Virginia Woolf ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth Press,

1980), vol. 3, p. 209.]

550 □ NOTES TO PP. 330-342

33. On the song of the chaffinch, and the distinction between the "subsong" and "full

song," see Thorpe, Learning and Instinct, pp. 420-426.

34. Alexander James Marshall, Bower-Birds (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1954).
35. Thorpe, Learning and Instinct, p. 426. In this respect, songs present an entirely differ-

ent problem than calls, which are often not very differentiated, and quite similar from species
to species.

36. Raymond Ruyer, La genesedes formes vivantes (Paris: Flammarion, 1958), chapter 7.
37. In particular, on widow birds (Viduinae), parasitic birds whose territorial song is

species-specific and whose courtship song is learned from their adoptive host, see J. Nicolai,
Der Brutparasitismus der Viduinae, Z. Tierps., vol. 21 (1964).

38. The participation of a black hole in an assemblage appears in numerous examples of

inhibition, or fascination-ecstasy, notably in the peacock: "The male peacock spreads his tail
feathers.... Then he bends the spread-out tail forward and points downward with his beak,
while his head is still upright. As a result, the female runs in front of him and pecks in a search-
ing manner on the ground in the focal point of the concave mirrorlike shape of the fanned tail.
The male peacock points, so to speak, with his fanned-out tail toward imaginary food,"
Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Ethology, p. 116. But the peacock's focal point is no more imaginary than
the finch's grass stem is a vestige or symbol; it is an assemblage converter, the passage to a
courtship assemblage, in this instance, effected by a black hole.

39.  Ruyer, La genese des formes vivantes, pp. 54ff.
40.  Francow Meyer, Problematique de revolution (Paris: PUF, 1954).
41.  Monod, Chance and Necessity.
42.  Female birds, which do not normally sing, start singing when they are administered

male sex hormones, "and they will sing the song of the species on which they have become
imprinted." Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Ethology, p. 265.

43. [

TRANS

Klee, On Modern Art, p. 43. Translation modified to agree with the French

translation cited by the authors.]

44. Klee, On Modern Art, p. 55 [translation modified—Trans.].
45. See Renaissance, manierisme, baroque, Actes du Xle stage international de Tours

(Paris: Vrin, 1972), part 1, "Periodizations."

46. Proust, Swann's Way, in vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past, p. 382 [translation

modified—Trans.].

47. See the ambiguous role of the friend at the end of Das Lied von der Erde. Or

Eichen-dorff s poem in Schumann's lied, Zwielicht (in Opus 39): "If you have a friend in this
world, do not trust him at this hour, for even if he is kind in eye and mouth, he dreams of war in
deceitful peace." (On the problem of the One-Alone, or "solitary Being," in German
romanticism, see Holderlin, "Le cours et la destination de l'homme en general," trans.
Emmanuel Marineau, Poesie, no. 4 [1978], pp. 6-22.)

48. "The people in Mussorgsky's Boris do not form a true crowd; at times one group sings,

then another, and then a third, each in turn, and most often in unison. As for the people in
Maitres chanteurs, it is not a crowd but an army that is powerfully organized in the German
manner and marches in rows. What I would like is something sparser, more divided, more
relaxed, more impalpable, something in appearance inorganic and yet at bottom ordered."
Quoted by Jean Barraque, Debussy (Paris: Seuil, 1977), p. 159. This problem—how to do a
crowd—obviously recurs in other arts also, painting, cinema, etc. One may refer in particular
to the films of Eisenstein, which proceed by this type of very special group individuation.

49. On the relations between the cry, the voice, the instrument, and music as "theater," see

Berio's statements introducing his records. One will recall the eminently musical Nietzschean
theme of a multiple cry of all superior men, at the end of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

NOTES TO PP. 342-350 □ 551

50. On Bartok's chromaticism, see Gisele Brelet's study in Histoire de la musique, vol. 2,

pp. 1036-1072.

51. In his book on Debussy, Barraque analyzes the "dialogue of the wind and the sea" in

terms offerees instead of themes: pp. 153-154. See Messiaen's statements on his own works:

sounds are no longer anything more "than vulgar means of expression intended to make dura-

tions measurable."

52. Odile Vivier describes Varese's procedures for treating sound matter, in Varese (Paris:

Seuil, 1973): the use of pure sounds acting as a prism (p. 36); mechanisms of projection onto a

plane (pp. 45 and 50); non-octave-forming scales (p. 75); the "ionization" procedure (pp.

98ff.); the theme of sound molecules, the transformations of which are determined by forces

or energies (passim).

53. See the interview with Stockhausen on the role of synthesizers and the effectively

"cosmic" dimension of music, in Le Monde, July 21,1977: "Work with very limited materials

and integrate the universe into them through a continuous variation." Richard Pinhas has

written an excellent analysis of the possibilities of synthesizers in this regard, in relation to

pop music: "Input, Output," in Atem, no. 10 (1977).

54. The definition of fuzzy aggregates brings up all kinds of problems because one cannot

appeal to a local determination: "The set of all objects on this table" is obviously not a fuzzy

set. Mathematicians concerned with the question speak only of "fuzzy subsets" because the

reference set must always be an ordinary set. See Arnold Kaufmann, Introduction to the The-
ory of Fuzzy Subsets, foreword L. A. Zadeh, trans. D. L. Swanson (New York: Academic Press,

1975), and Hourya Sinacoeur, "Logique et mathematique du flou," Critique, no. 372 (May

1978), pp. 512-525. In considering fuzziness as the characteristic of certain sets, our point of

departure was a functional, as opposed to a local, definition: sets of heterogeneous elements

that have a territorial, or rather territorializing, function. But this is a nominal definitiion that

does not take "what happened" into account. The real definition can come only at the level of

processes affecting the fuzzy set; a set is fuzzy if its elements belong to it only by virtue of spe-

cific operations of consistency and consolidation, which themselves follow a special logic.

55. Paul Klee, On Modern Art, p. 53: "The legend of the childishness of my drawing must

have originated from those linear compositions of mine in which I tried to combine a concrete

image, say that of a man, with the pure representation of the linear element. Had I wished to

present man 'as he is,' then I should have had to use such a bewildering confusion of lines that

pure elementary representation would have been out of the question. The result would have

been vagueness beyond recognition."

56. Paul Virilio, L'insecurite du territoire (Paris: Stock, 1975), p. 49. Henry Miller devel-

ops this theme in The Time of the Assassins. A Study ofRimbaud(Norfolk, Conn.: J. Laughlin,

1956), and in the text he wrote for Varese, "Lost! Saved!" (The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

[New York: New Directions, 1945]). It is undoubtedly Miller who has taken the modern figure

of the writer as cosmic artisan the farthest, particularly in Sexus.

57. On the relation of colors to sound, see Messiaen and Samuel, Conversations, pp.

15-17. Messiaen faults drug users for oversimplifying the relation, which they make into a

relation between a noise and a color, instead of isolating complexes of sounds-durations and

complexes of colors.

58. On the crystal, or the crystalline type, added and subtracted values, retrograde

motion, see also Messiaen's texts in Samuel, Conversations, and those of Paul Klee in his

diary, The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918, ed. and intro. Felix Klee (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1964).

59. See Roland-Manuel's article, "L'evolution de l'harmonie en France et le renouveau de

1880" (pp. 867-879), and the article by Delage on Chabrier (pp. 831-840), in Histoire de la
musique, vol. 2. And especially, Brelet's article on Bartok: "Are not the difficulties learned

552 □ NOTES TO PP. 350-355

music experiences in utilizing popular music due to this antinomy between melody and
theme? Popular music is melody, in its fullest sense, melody persuading us that it is
self-sufficient and is in fact synonymous with music itself. How could it not refuse to bend to
the learned development of a musical work pursuing its own ends? Many symphonies inspired
by folklore are only symphonies about a popular theme, to which the learned
development remains alien and exterior. The popular melody could never constitute a true
theme; and that is why, in popular music, the melody is the entire work, and why once it is
over it has no other resource than to repeat itself. But can't the melody transform itself into
a theme? Bartok solves this problem, which was thought insoluble" (p. 1056).

60. Marcel More, Ledieu Mozart etlemondedesoiseaux(Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 168.

And, on the crystal, pp. 83-89.

61. See Alban Berg's famous analysis of "Reverie" in Ecrits (Paris: Ed. du Rocher, 1957),

pp. 44-64.

12.1227: Treatise on Nomadology—the War Machine

1. Georges Dumezil, Mitra- Varuna (Paris: Gallimard, 1948 [forthcoming in English

translation from Zone Books]). On nexum and mutuum, the bond and the contract, see pp.
118-124.

2. "The first pole of the State (Varuna, Uranus, Romulus) operates by magic bond, sei-

zure, or immediate capture: it does not wage battles, and has no war machine, it binds, and
that is all." Its other pole (Mitra, Zeus, Numa) appropriates an army but imposes upon it
juridical and institutional rules that become nothing more than a piece in the State apparatus:
thus Mars-Tiwaz is not a warrior god, but a god who is a "jurist of war." See Dumezil,
Mitra-Varuna, pp. 113ff., 148ff., 202ff.

3. Dumezil, The Destiny of the Warrior, trans. Alf Hiltebeital (Chicago: University of

Chicaga Press, 1970).

4. For the role of the warrior as one who "unties" and opposes both the magic bond and

the juridical contract, see Dumezil, Mitra- Varuna, pp. 124-132. See also the analysis of furor
in the works of Dumezil.

5. [

TRANS

The first quote is from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, sec-

ond essay, sect. 17, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967),
p. 86; the second is from Franz Kafka, "An Old Manuscript," The Complete Stories, ed.
Nahum N. Glazer (New York: Schocken, 1983), p. 416.]

6. Luc de Heusch emphasizes the public nature of Nkongolo's actions, in contrast to

the secrecy of the actions of Mbidi and his son; in particular, the former eats in public, whereas
the others hide during their meals. Later, we will see the essential relation of the war machine
with the secret, which is as much a matter of principle as a result: espionage, strategy, diplo-
macy. Commentators have often underlined this link. Le roi ivre ou I'origine de I'Etat (Paris:
Gallimard, 1972).

7. For an analysis of the three sins in the cases of the Indian god Indra, the Scandina-

vian hero Starcatherus, and the Greek god Hercules, see Dumezil, Mythe et epopee, vol. 2, pp.
17-19 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). See also Dumezil, The Destiny of the Warrior.

8. Dumezil, Mitra- Varuna, p. 13 5. Dumezil analyzes the dangers and causes of the con-

fusion, which could be due to economic variables. See pp. 153, 159.

9. [

TRANS

Richard III, act I, scene i, line 158.]

10. On Ajax and the tragedy of Sophocles, see the analysis of Jean Starobinski, Trois

Fureurs (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). Starobinski explicitly raises the question of war and the
State.

NOTES TO PP. 356-362 □ 553

11. These themes are analyzed by Mathieu Carriere in an as yet unpublished study of

Kleist.

12. Pierre Clastres, Society against the State, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:

Uri-zen, 1977), and "Archeologie de la violence: la guerre dans les societes primitives"
and "Malheur du guerrier sauvage" in Recherches d'anthropologie politique (Paris: Seuil,
1980), pp. 171 -208, 209-248. In the last text, Clastres depicts the destiny of the warrior in
primitive society and analyzes the mechanism that prevents the concentration of power
(in the same way that Mauss demonstrated that the potlatch was a mechanism preventing
the concentration of wealth).

13. Jacques Meunier, Les gaminsde Bogota (Paris: Lattes, 1977), p. 159 ("blackmail for

dispersion") and p. 17 7: if necessary, "it is the other street children who, by means of a compli-
cated interplay of humiliations and silence, get the idea across that he must leave the gang."
Meunier emphasizes the degree to which the fate of the ex-gang member is jeopardized: not
only for health reasons, but because he finds it hard to integrate himself into the criminal
underworld, a society too hierarchical, too centralized, too centered on organs of power for
him to fit into (p. 178). On child gangs, see also the novel by Jorge Amado, Capitaes de areia
(Sao Paolo: Livraria Martins, 1944).

14. See I. S. Bernstein, "La dominance sociale chez les primates" in La Recherche, no. 91

(July 1978).

15. Clastres, Society against the State, p. 169: "The emergence of the State brought about

the great typological division between Savage and Civilized man; it created the unbridgeable
gulf whereby everything was changed, for, on the other side, Time became History." In order
to account for this emergence, Clastres cites first a demographic factor ("but there is no ques-
tion of replacing an economic determinism with a demographic determinism"; p. 180), then
the possibility of a warring machine (?) running amok; he also cites, more unexpectedly, the
indirect role of a certain mode of prophetic speech, which, directed first against the "chiefs,"
produces a formidable new kind of power. But one obviously cannot prejudge more elabo-
rated solutions Clastres might have found for this problem. On the possible role of prophetic
speech, refer to Helene Clastres, La terre sans mal, le prophetisme tupi-guarani (Paris: Edi-
tions du Seuil, 1975).

16. Michel Serres, La naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrece. Fleuves et turbu-

lences (Paris: Minuit, 1977). Serres was the first to make the first three points given in the text;
the fourth seems to follow from them.

17. [

TRANS

According to Serres, the clinamen, or declination of the atom, is the "mini-

mal angle leading to the formation of a vortex, and appears by chance in a laminar flow" (La
naissance de la physique, p. 14). The clinamen is the angle between a curve and its tangent, or
"the smallest [angle] one can make, preventing anything from coming between the two lines
which form it.... In other words, the angle appears at the same time as curvature" (p. 18).
"The clinamen is a differential" (p. 11).]

18. [

TRANS

A flow is laminar when, "no matter how small we make the layers (or lamel-

lae) into which we divide the flow, they remain strictly parallel to one another in their move-
ments"; Serres, ibid., p. 12.]

19. [

TRANS

Turba "designates a multitude, a large population, confusion and tumult."

Turbo "is a round form in movement... a revolving cone or vortical spiral." "The origin of
things and the beginning of order consists simply in the subtle passage from turba to turbo";
Serres, ibid., pp. 38-39.]

20. This is the distinction Pierre Boulez makes between two kinds of space-time in

music: in striated space, the measure can be irregular or regular, but it is always assignable; in
smooth space, the partition, or break, "can be effected at will." Boulez on Music Today, trans.

554 □ NOTES TO PP. 362-366

Susan Bradshaw and Richard Bennett (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971),
p. 85.

21. Greek geometry is thoroughly marked by the opposition between these two poles,

the theorematic and problematic, and by the relative triumph of the former: in his Commen-
tary of the First Book of Euclid's Elements, trans, and intro. Glenn R. Murrow (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), Proclus analyzes the difference between the poles,
taking the Speusippus-Menaechmus opposition as an example. Mathematics has always been
marked by this tension also; for example, the axiomatic element has confronted a proble-
matic, "intuitionist," or "constructivist" current emphasizing a calculus of problems very dif-
ferent from axiomatics, or any theorematic approach. See Georges Bouligand, Le d'eclin des
absolus mathematico-logiques (Paris: Ed. d'Enseignement Superieur, 1949).

22. Paul Virilio, L'insecurite du territoire (Paris: Stock, 1975), p. 120: "We know that

the youth of geometry, geometry as free, creative investigation, came to an end with Ar-
chimedes. . .. The sword of a Roman soldier cut the thread, tradition says. In killing geo-
metrical creation, the Roman State lay the foundation for the geometrical imperialism of
the West."

23. With Monge, and especially Poncelet, the limits of sensible, or even spatial, repre-

sentation (striated space) are indeed surpassed, but less in the direction of a symbolic power
(puissance) of abstraction than toward a transspatial imagination, or a transintuition (conti-
nuity). See Leon Brunschvicg's commentary on Poncelet, Les etapes de la philosophic
mathematique (Paris: PUF, 1947).

24. Michel Serres (La naissance de la physique, pp. 105-107) analyzes the opposition

d'Alembert-Bernoulli from this point of view. More generally, what is at issue is the difference
between two models of space: "In the Mediterranean basin there is a shortage of water, and he
who harnesses water rules. Hence that world of physics in which the conduit is essential, and
the clinamen seems like freedom because it is precisely a turbulence that rejects forced flow.
Incomprehensible to scientific theory, incomprehensible to the master of the waters....
Hence the great figure of Archimedes: the master of floating bodies and military machines"
(p. 106).

2 5. See Ben veniste, "The Notion of Rhythm in Its Linguistic Expression" in Problems in

General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami
Press, 1971), pp. 281-288. This text, often considered decisive, seems ambiguous to us
because it invokes Democritus and atomism without dealing with the hydraulic question, and
because it treats rhythm as a "secondary specialization" of the form of the body (p. 286).

26. Anne Querrien, Devenir fonctionnaire ou le travail de I'Etat (Paris: Cerfi). We have

drawn from this book, as well as from unpublished studies by Anne Querrien.

27. See Raoul Vergez, Les illumines de I'art royal. Huit siecles de compagnonnages

(Paris: Julliard, 1976), p. 54. [

TRANS

In the present context, trait refers to the cutting line fol-

lowed by the artisan and to the working sketch of the construction under way. Vergez gives the
following definition: "The Trait is a kind of graphic poem derived from geometry, which indi-
cates the building plan in sketches drawn with precision on the ground, showing sections, ele-
vations and all other projections, the three dimensions of a volume"; p. 86.]

28. Gerard Desargues, Oeuvres (Paris: Leiber, 1864). See also the text by Michel Chasles

[Apercu historique sur I'origine et le developpement de methodes en geometrie... (Brussels:
M. Hayez, 1837)—Trans.], which establishes a continuity between Desargues, Monge, and
Poncelet as the "founders of a modern geometry."

29. Anne Querrien, Devenir fonctionnaire, pp. 26-27: "Is the State founded upon the col-

lapse of experimentation?. . . The State is not under construction, its construction sites must
be short-lived. An installation is made to function, not to be socially constructed: from this

NOTES TO PP. 366-371 □ 555

point of view, the State involves in the construction only those who are paid to implement or

command, and who are obliged to follow the model of a preestablished experimentation."

30. On the question of the "Colbert lobby," see Daniel Dessert and Jean-Louis Journet,

"Le Lobby Colbert. Un royaume, ou une affaire de famille?" Annates, 30, no. 6

(November-December 1975), pp. 1303-1336.

31. See Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. Franz

Rosenthal (Princeton, N J.: Princeton University Press, 1967). One of the essential themes of

this masterpiece is the sociological problem of the esprit de corps, and its ambiguity. Ibn

Khaldun contrasts bedouinism (the bedouin life-style, not the ethnic group) with sedentarity

or city living. The first aspect of this opposition is the inverted relation between the public and

the secret: not only is there a secrecy of the bedouin war machine, as opposed to the publicity

of the State city dweller, but in the first case "eminence" is based on a secret solidarity, while in

the second case the secret is subordinated to the demands of social eminence. Second,

bedouinism brings into play both a great purity and a great mobility of the lineages and their

genealogy, whereas city life makes for lineages that are very impure, and at the same time rigid

and fixed: Solidarity has a different meaning at either pole. Third, and this is the main point,

bedouin lineages mobilize an esprit de corps and integrate into it, as a new dimension: this is
asablyah, or ikhtilat, from which the Arabic word for socialism is derived (Ibn Khaldun

stresses the absence of any "power" residing in the tribal chief, who has no State constraints at

his disposal). On the other hand, in city living the esprit de corps becomes a dimension of

power and is adapted for "autocracy."

32. The principal texts of Husserl are Ideas, trans. W. R. Gibson (New York: Humanities

Press, 1976), part 1, sec. 74, and Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction,

trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., ed. David B. Allison (Stoney Brook, N.Y.: N. Hayes, 1978) (with

Derrida's very important commentary, pp. 118-132). On the issue of a vague yet rigorous sci-

ence, we may refer to the formula of Michel Serres, in his commentary on the geometrical fig-

ure called the salinon: "It is rigorous, anexact. And not precise, exact or inexact. Only a

metrics is exact" (Naissance de la physique, p. 29). Gaston Bachelard's book Essai sur la
connaissance approch'ee (Paris: Vrin, 1927) remains the best study of the steps and procedures

constituting a rigor of the anexact, and of their creative role in science.

33. Gilbert Simondon has contributed much to the analysis and critique of the

hylo-morphic schema and of its social presuppositions ("form corresponds to what the

man in command has thought to himself, and must express in a positive manner when he

gives his orders: form is thus of the order of the expressible"). To the form-matter schema,

Simondon opposes a dynamic schema, that of matter endowed with singularities-forces, or

the energetic conditions at the basis of a system. The result is an entirely different

conception of the relations between science and technology. See L'individu et sa genese
physico-biologique (Paris: PUF, 1964).

34. In Timaeus, 28-29, Plato entertains for an instant the thought that Becoming is not

simply the inevitable characteristic of copies or reproductions, but could itself be a model

rivaling the Identical and the Uniform. He states this hypothesis only in order to reject it; for

it is true that if becoming is a model, not only must the duality of the model and the copy, of

the model and reproduction, disappear, but the very notions of model and reproduction tend

to lose all meaning, [

TRANS

Deleuze develops this point in "Plato and the Simulacrum," trans.

Rosalind Krauss, October, 27 (Winter 1983), pp. 45-56. See especially p. 53.]

3 5. [

TRANS

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York:

Vintage, 1968), sec. 630(1885), p. 336.]

36. The situation is in fact more complex than that, and gravity is not the only feature of

the dominant model: there is heat in addition to gravity (already in chemistry, combustion is

coupled with weight). Even so, the problem was to know to what extent the "thermal field"

556 □ NOTES TO PP. 371-379

deviated from gravitational space, or on the contrary was integrated with it. Monge is a typical

example; he began by grouping heat, light, and electricity as "variable affections of bodies,"

the concern of "specific physics," while general physics would deal with extension, gravity,

and movement. It was only later that Monge unified all of the fields under general physics

(Anne Querrien).

37. Serres, La naissance de la physique, p. 65.

38. Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1971), p. 88.

39. Albert Lautman has shown quite clearly how Riemann spaces, for example, admit a

Euclidean conjunction making it possible at all times to define the parallelism of two neigh-

boring vectors; this being the case, instead of exploring a multiplicity by legwork, the multipli-

city is treated as though "immersed in a Euclidean space with a sufficient number of

dimensions." See Les sch'emas de structure (Paris: Hermann, 1938), pp. 23-24, 43-47.

40. In Bergson, the relations between intuition and intelligence are very complex, and

they are in perpetual interaction. Bouligand's theme is also relevant here: the dualism of the

two mathematical elements, the "problem" and the "global synthesis," is developed only

when they enter a field of interaction in which the global synthesis defines the "categories"

without which the problem would have no general solution. See Le d'eclin des absolus
math'ematico-logiques.

41. Marcel Detienne, in Les maitres de v'erit'e dans la Grece archdique (Paris: Maspero,

1973), clearly articulates these two poles of thought, which correspond to the two aspects of

sovereignty according to Dumezil: the magico-religious speech of the despot or of the "old

man of the sea," and the dialogue-speech of the city. Not only are the principal character types

of Greek thought (the Poet, the Physicist, the Philosopher, the Sophist, etc.) situated in rela-

tion to these poles, but Detienne interposes between the two poles a distinct group, the Warri-

ors, which brings about transition or evolution.

42. There exists a Hegelianism of the right that lives on in official political philosophy

and weds the destiny of thought to the State. Alexandre Kojeve ("Tyranny and Wisdom," in

Leo Strauss, On Tyranny [New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963]) and Eric Weil (Hegel et
I'Etat. Philosophiepolitique [Paris: Vrin, 1974]) are its recent representatives. From Hegel to

Max Weber there developed a whole line of reflection on the relation of the modern State to

Reason, both as rational-technical and as reasonable-human. If it is objected that this ration-

ality, already present in the archaic imperial State, is the optimum of the governors them-

selves, the Hegelians respond that the rational-reasonable cannot exist without a minimum of

participation by everybody. The question, rather, is whether the very form of the

rational-reasonable is not extracted from the State, in a way that necessarily makes it right,

gives it "reason" (lui donner necessairement "raison").

43. On the role of the ancient poet as a "functionary of sovereignty," see Dumezil,

Servius et la Fortune (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), pp. 64ff., and Detienne, Les maitres de v'erit'e,

pp. 17ff.

44. See Michel Foucault's analysis of Maurice Blanchot and the form of exteriority of

thought: "La pensee du dehors," Critique, no. 229 (June 1966), pp. 523-548.

45. Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator, in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J.

Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 177-178.

46. A curious text of Karl Jaspers, entitled Descartes und die Philosophie (Berlin: W. de

Gruyter, 1956), develops this point of view and accepts its implications.

47. Kenneth White, Intellectual Nomadism. The title of the second volume of this

unpublished work is Poetry and Tribe.

48. [

TRANS

Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell, trans. Louise Varese (Norfolk, Conn.:

New Directions, 1952), pp. 9, 13, 17, 39.]

NOTES TO PP. 380-384 □ 557

49. Anny Milovanoff, "La seconde peau du nomade," Nouvelles litt'eraires, no. 2646

(July 27, 1978), p. 18: "The Larbaa nomads, on the border of the Algerian Sahara, use the

word triga, which generally means road or way, to designate the woven straps serving to rein-

force the cords holding the tent to the stakes.... In nomad thought, the dwelling is tied not to a

territory but rather to an itinerary. Refusing to take possession of the land they cross, the

nomads construct an environment out of wool and goat hair, one that leaves no mark at the

temporary site it occupies.... Thus wool, a soft material, gives nomad life its unity....

Nomads pause at the representation of their journeys, not at a figuration of the space they

cross. They leave space to space.... Woolly polymorphism."

50. See W. Montgomery Watt, Mohammed at Medina (London: Oxford University

Press, 1956), pp. 85-86, 242.

51. Emmanuel Laroche, Histoire de la ratine "Nem " en grec ancien (Paris: Klincksieck,

1949). The root "Nem" indicates distribution, not allocation, even when the two are linked.

In the pastoral sense, the distribution of animals is effected in a nonlimited space and implies

no parceling out of land: "The occupation of shepherd, in the Homeric age, had nothing to do

with a parceling of land; when the agrarian question came to the foreground, in the time of

Solon, it was expressed in an entirely different vocabulary." To take to pasture (nemo) refers

not to a parceling out but to a scattering, to a repartition of animals. It was only after Solon

that Nomos came to designate the principle at the basis of the laws and of right (Thesmo'i and

Dike), and then came to be identified with the laws themselves. Prior to that, there was instead

an alternative between the city, or polis, ruled by laws, and the outskirts as the place of the

nomos. A similar alternative is found in the work of Ibn Khaldun: between hadara as city liv-

ing, and badiya as nomos (not the town, but the preurban countryside, the plateau, steppe,

mountain, or desert).

52. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947),

abridged by D. C. Somerwell, vol. 1, pp. 164-186: "They flung themselves upon the Steppe,

not to escape beyond its bounds but to make themselves at home on it" (p. 168).

53. See Pierre Hubac, Les nomades (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1948), pp. 26-29

(although Hubac tends to confuse nomads and migrants).

54. On the nomads of the sea, or of the archipelago, Jose Emperaire writes: "They do not

grasp an itinerary as a whole, but in a fragmentary manner, by juxtaposing in order its various

successive stages, from campsite to campsite in the course of the journey. For each of these

stages, they estimate the length of the crossing and the successive changes in direction mark-

ing it." Les nomades de la mer (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), p. 225.

55. Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian Sands (London: Longmans, Green, 1959), pp. 112-113,

125, 165-166.

56. See the two admirable descriptions, of the sand desert by Wilfred Thesiger and of the

ice desert by Edmund Carpenter, in Eskimo (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964): the

winds, and tactile and sound qualities; the secondary character of visual data, particularly the

indifference of the nomads to astronomy as a royal science; and yet the presence of a whole

minor science of qualitative variables and traces.

57. EmileFelixGautier,Le passe del'AfriqueduNord (Paris: Payot, 1952), pp. 267-316.

58. From this perspective, Clastres's analysis of Indian prophetism can be generalized:

"On one side, the chiefs, on the other, and standing against them, the prophets. ... And the

prophetic machine worked perfectly well since the karai were able to sweep astonishing

masses of Indians along behind them.. .. the insurrectional act of the prophets against the

chiefs conferred on the former, through a strange reversal of things, infinitely more power

than was held by the latter." Society against the State, pp. 184-185.

59. One of the most interesting themes of the classic work by Paul Alphandery (La

chretiente et Videe de croisade [Paris: Albin Michel, 1959] is his demonstration that the

558 D NOTES TO PP. 384-386

changes in course, the pauses, the detours were an integral part of the Crusade: "this army of

crusaders that we envision as a modern army, like those of Louis XIV or Napoleon, marching

with absolute passivity, obeying the will of a diplomatic officer and staff. Such an army knows

where it is going, and when it makes a mistake, it is not for lack of reflection. A history more

attentive to differences accepts a more realistic image of the army of the Crusade. The army of

the Crusade was freely, sometimes anarchically alive. ... This army was motivated from

within, as a function of a complex coherence by virtue of which nothing happened by chance.

It is certain that the conquest of Constantinople had its reason, necessity and a religious char-

acter, like the other deeds of the Crusades" (vol. 2, p. 7). Alphandery shows in particular that

the idea of a battle against the Infidel, at any point, appeared early on, along with the idea of

liberating the Holy Land (vol. 1, p. 219).

60. Modern historians have been inspired to fine analyses by this confrontation between

the East and the West, which began in the Middle Ages (and is tied to the question, Why did

capitalism develop in the West and not elsewhere?). See especially Fernand Braudel, Capital-
ism and Material Life, 1400-1800, trans. Miriam Kochan (New York: Harper and Row, 1967),

pp. 97-108; Pierre Chaunu, L'expansion europeenne du Xllle au XVe siecle (Paris: PUF,

1969), pp. 334-339 ("Why Europe? Why not China?"); Maurice Lombard, Espaces et reseaux
du hautMoyen Age (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), chapter 8 (and p. 219: "What is called defor-

estation in the East is named clearing in the West. The first deep cause of the shift of the domi-

nant centers from the East to the West is therefore a geographical reason: forest-clearing

proved to have more potential than desert-oasis").

61. Marx's observations on the despotic formations of Asia have been confirmed by the

African analyses of Max Gluckman, Custom and Conflict in Africa (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press,

1959): at the same time immutability of form and constant rebellion. The idea of a "transfor-

mation" of the State indeed seems to be a Western one. And that other idea, the "destruction"

of the State, belongs much more to the East and to the conditions of a nomad war machine.

Attempts have been made to present the two ideas as successive phases of revolution, but

there are too many differences between them and they are difficult to reconcile; they reflect

the opposition between the socialist and anarchist currents of the nineteenth century. The

Western proletariat itself is perceived from two points of view: as having to seize power and

transform the State apparatus (the point of view of labor power), and as willing or wishing for

the destruction of the State (this time, the point of view of nomadization power). Even Marx

defines the proletariat not only as alienated (labor) but as deterritorialized. The proletariat, in

this second perspective, appears as the heir to the nomad in the Western world. Not only did

many anarchists invoke nomadic themes originating in the East, but the bourgeoisie above all

were quick to equate proletarians and nomads, comparing Paris to a city haunted by nomads

(see Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of
the Nineteenth Century, trans. Frank Jellenck [New York: H. Fertig, 1973], pp. 362-366).

62. See Lucien Musset, Les invasions. Le secondassaut (Paris: PUF, 1965), for example,

the analysis of the Danes' three "phases," pp. 135-137.

63. Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext[e],

1986), pp. 12-13 andpassim. Not only is the "town" unthinkable apart from the exterior flows

with which it is in contact, and the circulation of which it regulates, but specific architectural

aggregates, the fortress, for example, are veritable transformers, by virtue of their interior

spaces, which allow an analysis, prolongation, or restitution of movement. Virilio concludes

that the issue is less confinement than the management of the public ways, or the control of

movement. Foucault was already moving in this direction with his analysis of the naval hospital

as operator and filter; see Discipline and Punish, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York:

Vintage, 1975), pp. 143-146.

64. On Chinese, and Arab, navigation, the reasons behind their failure, and the impor-

NOTES TO PP. 386-390 □ 559

tance of this question in the East-West "dossier," see Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life,
pp. 300-309, and Chaunu, L'expansion europeenne, pp. 145-147.

65. Virilio gives a very good definition of the fleet in being and its historical conse-

quences: "The fleet in being... is the permanent presence in the sea of an invisible fleet able
to strike no matter where and no matter when ... it is a new idea of violence that no longer
comes from direct confrontation... but rather from the unequal properties of bodies, evalu-
ation of the number of movements allowed them in a chosen element, permanent verification
of their dynamic efficiency... .Henceforth it is no longer a question of crossing a continent or
an ocean from one city to the next, one shore to the next. The fleet in being creates ... the
notion of displacement without destination in space and time.... The strategic submarine
has no need to go anywhere in particular; it is content, while controlling the sea, to remain
invisible . .. the realization of the absolute, uninterrupted, circular voyage, since it involves
neither departure nor arrival... .If, as Lenin claimed,'strategy means choosing which points
we apply force to,' we must admit that these 'points', today, are no longer geostrategic
strongpoints, since from any given spot we can now reach any other, no matter where it might
be... geographic localization seems to have definitively lost its strategic value, and, inversely,
that this same value is attributed to the delocalization of the vector, of a vector in permanent
movement"; Speed and Politics, pp. 38,40-41,134-135. Virilio's texts are of great importance
and originality in every respect. The only point that presents a difficulty for us is his assimila-
tion of three groups of speed that seem very different to us: (1) speeds of nomadic, or revolu-
tionary, tendency (riot, guerrilla warfare); (2) speeds that are regulated, converted, appropri-
ated by the State apparatus (management of the public ways); (3) speeds that are reinstated by
a worldwide organization of total war, or planetary overarmament (from the fleet in being to
nuclear strategy). Virilio tends to equate these groups on account of their interactions and
makes a general case for the "fascist" character of speed. It is, nevertheless, his own analyses
that make these distinctions possible.

66. Jean-Pierre Vernant in particular has analyzed the connection between the Greek

city-state and a homogeneous geometrical extension, Mythe et pensee chez les Grecs (Paris:
Maspero, 1971 -1974), vol. 1, part 3. The problem is necessarily more complicated in relation
to the archaic empires, or in relation to formations subsequent to the classical city-state. That
is because the space in question is very different. But it is still the case that the number is sub-
ordinated to space, as Vernant suggests with regard to Plato's ideal state. The Pythagorean or
Neoplatonic conceptions of number envelop imperial astronomical spaces of a type other
than homogeneous extension, but they maintain the subordination of the number; that is why
Numbers become ideal, but not strictly speaking "numbering."

67. Dumezil stresses the role played by the arithmetic element in the earliest forms of

political sovereignty. He even tends to make it a third pole of sovereignty. See Servius et la For-
tune and Le troisieme souverain (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1949). But the role of this arithmetic
element is, rather, to organize a matter; in so doing it submits that matter to one or the other of
the two principal poles.

68. Karl von Clausewitz stresses the secondary role of geometry, in tactics and in strat-

egy: On War, trans. Michael Howard, Peter Paret, and Bernard Brodie (Princeton, N. J.:
Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 214-216 ("The Geometrical Factor").

69. See one of the most profound ancient texts relating the number and direction to the

war machine, Ssu-ma Ch'ien, The Records of the Grand Historian, trans. Burton Watson (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1961), vol. 2, pp. 155-193 ("The Account of the
Hsiung-nu").

70. Frank Herbert, Children of Dune (New York: Berkley Books, 1977), p. 212. One may

refer to the characteristics proposed by Julia Kristeva to define the numbering number:

560 □ NOTES TO PP. 390-399

"arrangement," "plural and contingent distribution," "infini-point," "rigorous approxima-

tion," etc. Semeiotike. Recherches pour une semanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1969), pp. 293-297.

71. Boris Iakovlevich Vladimirtsov, Le regime social des Mongols, trans. Michel Carsow

(Paris: Maisonneuve, 1948). The term used by Vladimirtsov, "antrustions," is borrowed from

the Saxon regime, in which the king's company, or "trust," was composed of Franks.

72. A particularly interesting case is that of a special body of smiths among the Tuareg,

called the Enaden (the "Others"); the Enaden are thought to have been originally Sudanese

slaves, Jewish settlers in the Sahara, or descendants of the knights of Saint Louis. See Rene

Pottier, "Les artisans sahariens du metal chez les Touareg," in Techniques et civilisations, vol.

1 (M'etaux et civilisations), no. 2 (1945), pp. 31-40.

73. Feudalism is no less a military system than so-called military democracy; but both

systems assume an army integrated into some kind of State apparatus (for feudalism, it was

the Carolingian land reform). It is Vladimirtsov who developed a feudal interpretation of the

nomads of the steppe, whereas Mikhail Griaznov, The Ancient Civilization of Southern
Siberia, trans. James Hogarth (New York: Cowles, 1969), leans toward military democracy.

But one of Vladimirtsov's main arguments is that the organization of the nomads becomes

feudal precisely to the extent that it is in disintegration, or is integrated into the empires it

conquers. He himself remarks that in the beginning the Mongols did not organize the seden-

tary land they took over into fiefs, true or false.

74. J. F. C. Fuller, Armament and History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1945),

p. 5.

75. Paul Virilio, "Metempsychose du passager," Traverses, no. 8 (May 1977), pp. 11-19.

Virilio, however, asserts that there was an indirect transition from hunting to war: when

women served as "portage or pack" animals, which already enabled the hunters to enter into a

relation of "homosexual duel" transcending the hunt. But it seems that Virilio himself invites

us to make a distinction between speed, as projector and projectile, and displacement, as

transport and portage. The war machine is defined from the first point of view, while the sec-

ond relates to the public sphere. The horse, for example, is not a part of the war machine if it

serves only to transport men who dismount to do battle. The war machine is defined by

action, not transport, even if the transport reacts upon the action.

76. J. F. C. Fuller, Armaments and History, pp. 137ff., shows that the First World War

was first conceived as an offensive war of movement based on artillery. But artillery was

turned against artillery, forcing immobility. It was not possible to reinstate mobility in the war

through "ever-increasing shell fire" (p. 138) since the craters made the terrain all the harder to

negotiate. The solution, to which the English, and General Fuller in particular, made decisive

contributions, came in the form of the tank: the tank, a "landship" (p. 139), reconstituted a

kind of maritime or smooth space on land, and "superimposed naval tactics on land warfare"

(p. 140). As a general rule, military response is never in kind: the tank was the response to artil-

lery, the helicopter to the tank, etc. This makes for an innovation factor in the war machine

that is very different from innovation in the work machine.

77. On this general distinction between the two models, "work-free action," "consum-

ing force/conserving force," "real effect/formal effect," etc., see Martial Gueroult's expo-

sition, Dynamique et metaphysique leibniziennes (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1934), pp. 55,

119 ff., 222-224.

78. Marcel Detienne, "La phalange, problemes et controverses," in Problemes de la

guerre en Grece ancienne (Civilisations et societes, no. 11), ed. Jean-Pierre Vernant (The

Hague: Mouton, 1968), pp. 119-143: "Technology is in a way internal to the social and the

mental," (p. 134).

79. On the stirrup and the plow, see Lynn Townsend White, Jr., Medieval Technology and

Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), chapters 1 and 2. Similarly, it has

NOTES TO PP. 399-406 □ 561

been shown in the case of dry rice cultivation in Asia that the digging stick, the hoe, and the

plow depend upon collective assemblages that vary according to population density and the

fallow period. This enables Braudel to conclude: "The tool, according to this theory, is the

result and no longer the cause"; Capitalism and Material Life, p. 116.

80. Treatises on martial arts remind us that the Ways, which are still subject to the laws of

gravity, must be transcended in the void. Kleist's About Marionettes, trans. Michael Lebeck

(Mindelheim: Three Kings Press, 1970), without question one of the most spontaneously ori-

ental texts in Western literature, presents a similar movement: the linear displacement of the

center of gravity is still "mechanical" and relates to something more "mysterious" that con-

cerns the soul and knows nothing of weight.

81. See Paul Pelliot, "Les systemes d'ecriture en usage chez les anciens Mongols," Asia

Major 2 (1925), pp. 284-289: The Mongols used the Uighur script, with the Syriac alphabet (it

was the Tibetans who produced a phonetic theory of Uighur writing); the two versions of the
Secret History of the Mongols that have been passed down to us are a Chinese translation and a

phonetic transcription in Chinese characters.

82. Georges Charriere, Scythian Art (New York: Alpine Fine Arts Collection, 1979), p.

185 [translation modified].

83. See Lucien Musset, Introduction a la runologie (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1965).
84. There are, of course, forms of cooking and architecture that are part of the nomad

war machine, but they fall under a different "trait," one distinguishing them from their seden-

tary form. Nomad architecture, for example, the Eskimo igloo orthe Hunnish wooden palace,

is a derivative of the tent: its influence on sedentary art came by way of domes and

half-domes, and above all of space starting very low, as in a tent. As for nomad cooking, it

consists literally of break-fast (the paschal tradition is nomadic). And it is under this trait that it

can be part of a war machine: for example, the Janissaries used a cooking pot as their rallying

point; there were different ranks of cooks, and their hat had a wooden spoon through it.

85. Itisinthe Trait'edu rebelle (Paris: Bourgois, 1981) that Jiinger takes his clearest stand

against national socialism and develops certain points contained in Der Arbeiter: a concep-

tion of the "line" as an active escape passing between the two figures of the old Soldier and the

modern Worker, carrying both toward another destiny in another assembly (nothing of this

remains in Heidegger's notion of the Line, although it is dedicated to Jiinger).

86. Lynn White, Jr., who is actually not inclined to ascribe much power of innovation

to the nomads, sometimes establishes extensive technological lineages with surprising

origins: he traces hot-air and turbine technologies to Malaya (Medieval Technology and
Social Change, p. 95 and note): "Thus a chain of technological stimuli may be traced back

from some of the major figures of early modern science and technology through the later

Middle Ages to the jungles of Malaya. A second, and related, Malay invention, the fire pis-

ton, may have had significant influence upon the European understanding of air pressure

and its applications."

87. On the particularly thorny question of the stirrup, see Lynn White, Jr., Medieval

Technology and Social Change, chapter 1.

88. See the fine article by A. Mazaheri, "Le sabre contre l'epee," Annates 13, no. 4

(October-December 1958), pp. 669-686.

89. Henri Limet, Le travail du metal au pays de Sumer au temps de la life dynastie d'Ur

(Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1960), pp. 33-40.

90. Along these lines, Mazaheri effectively demonstrates that the saber and sword

belong to two distinct technological lineages. In particular, damasking (damassage), which

does not come from Damascus at all, but rather from the Greek or Persian word for diamond,

designates the treatment of cast steel that makes it as hard as a diamond and the designs in this

steel resulting from the crystallization of the cement ("true damask was made in the centers

562 □ NOTES TO PP. 406-414

that had never experienced Roman domination"). But on the other hand, damascening
(damasquinage), which did come from Damascus, designates only inlay in metal (or in fab-

ric), intentional designs imitating damasking using entirely different means.

91. Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Milieu et techniques (Paris: Albin Michel, 1945), pp. 356ff.

Gilbert Simondon, discussing short series, takes up the question of the "absolute origins of a

technological lineage," or of the creation of a "technical essence": Du mode d'existence des
objects techniques (Paris: Aubier, 1969), pp. 41-49.

92. On the mold-modulation relation, and the way in which molding hides or contracts

an operation of modulation that is essential to matter-movement, see Simondon, Du mode
d'existence, pp. 2 8-50 ("modulation is molding in a continuous and perpetually variable man-

ner"; p. 42). Simondon clearly shows that the hylomorphic schema owes its power not to the

technological operation but to the social model of work subsuming that operation (pp.

47-49).

93. Simondon feels no special attraction for the problems of metallurgy. His analysis is

not, in fact, historical and prefers to deal with examples drawn from electronics. But, histori-

cally, there is no electronics without metallurgy. Thus Simondon pays homage to metallurgy:

"Metallurgy does not entirely accommodate itself to an analysis using the hylomorphic

schema. The fixing of the form is not accomplished visibly in a single stroke, but in several

successive operations; the forging and quenching of steel are anterior and posterior, respec-

tively, to the fixing of the form in the strict sense; forging and quenching are, nevertheless,

operations that constitute objects" (L'individu, p. 59).

94. Not only must myths be taken into account, but also positive history, for example,

the role of "the brass" in the evolution of musical form; or again, the constitution of a "metal-

lic synthesis" in electronic music (Richard Pinhas).

95. Wilhelm Worringer defines Gothic art in terms of a geometrical line that is "primi-

tive" but has taken on life. But this vitality is not organic, as it will be in the classical world: this

line "embodies no organic expression.. . it is nevertheless of the utmost vitality... .Since this

line is lacking in all organic timbre, its expression of life must, as an expression, be divorced

from organic life.. . The pathos of movement which lies in this vitalized geometry—a pre-

lude to the vitalized mathematics of Gothic architecture—forces our sensibility to an effort

unnatural to it." Form in Gothic (London: Putnam's and Sons, 1927), pp. 41-42.

96. This is one of the essential points of V. Gordon Childe's argument in The Prehistory

of European Civilization (London: Cassell, 1962): the metallurgist is the first specialized arti-

san, whose sustenance is made possible by the formation of an agricultural surplus. The rela-

tion of the smith to agriculture has to do not only with the tools smiths manufacture but also

with the food they take or receive. The Dogon myth, as analyzed in its variants by Griaule, can

be seen as marking this relation, in which the smith receives or steals grains, and hides them in

his mallet.

97. Maurice Lombard, Lesm'etauxdansI'ancien mondedu VeauXIesiecle(TheHague:

Mouton, 1974), pp. 75, 255.

98. The social position of the smith has been the object of detailed studies; for Africa in

particular see the classic study by W. B. Cline, "Mining and Metallurgy in Negro Africa," Gen-
eral Series in Anthropology, no. 5 (1937); and Pierre Clement, "Le forgeron en Afrique noire,"
Revue de geographie humaine et d'ethnologie, no. 2 (April-June 1948), pp. 35-58. But these

studies are hardly conclusive; the better defined the principles invoked—"reaction of con-

tempt," "of approbation," "of apprehension"—the hazier and more overlapping the results,

as seen in Clement's tables.

99. See Jules Bloch, Les Tziganes, Que sais-je?, no. 580 (Paris: PUF, 1969). Bloch dem-

onstrates precisely that the distinction between sedentaries and nomads becomes secondary

in connection with cave dwelling.

NOTES TO PP. 414-421 □ 563

100. Elie Faure, Medieval Art, vol. 2 of History of Art, trans. Walter Pach (Garden City,

N.Y.: Garden City Publishing, 1937), pp. 12-14.

101. On these peoples and their mysteries, see the analyses of V. Gordon Childe, The Pre-

history of European Society, chapter 7 ("Missionaries, Traders and Warriors of Temperate

Europe"), and The Dawn of European Civilization (New York: Knopf, 1958).

102. Maurice Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, Le renard pale, vol. 1 (Paris: Institut

d'ethnologie, 1965), p. 376.

103. The book by Robert James Forbes, Metallurgy in Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 1950),

analyzes the different ages of metallurgy, as well as the types of metallurgists that existed in the

"ore stage": the "miner," who did the prospecting and mining; the "smelter" [who produced

the crude metal or alloy]; the "blacksmith" [who manufactured mass products from crude

metals]; and the "metalworker" [who produced smaller objects; includes gold- and silver-

smiths] (pp. 74-76). The specialization system becomes more complicated in the Iron Age,

with attendant variations in the nomad-itinerant-sedentary distribution.

104. The texts of T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (New York: Doubleday,

Doran, 1935) and "The Science of Guerrilla War," in Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th ed.

(1929), vol. 10, pp. 950-953, remain among the most significant works on guerrilla warfare;

they present themselves as an "anti-Foch" theory and elaborate the notion of the nonbattle.

But the nonbattle has a history that is not entirely dependent on guerrilla warfare: (1) the

traditional distinction between the "battle" and the "maneuver" in war; see Raymon Aron,
Penser la guerre. Clausewitz (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), vol. 1, pp. 122-131; (2) the way in

which the war of movement places the role and importance of the battle in question (as early

as Marshal de Saxe, and the controversial question of the battle during the Napoleonic

Wars); (3) finally, more recently, the critique of the battle in the name of nuclear arms, which

play a deterrent role, with conventional forces now having a role only in "testing" or "man-

euver"; see the Gaullist conception of the nonbattle, and Guy Brossollet, Essai sur la
non-bataille (Paris: Belin, 1975). The recent return to the notion of the battle cannot be

explained simply by technological factors such as the development of tactical nuclear arms,

but implies political considerations—it is upon these that the role assigned to the battle (or

nonbattle) in war depends.

105. On the fundamental differences between Tamerlane and Genghis Khan, see Rene

Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes, trans. Naomi Walford (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers

University Press, 1970), pp. 417-419.

106. See Armees etfiscalit'e dans le monde antique, ed. A. Chastagnol, C. Nicolet, and

H. van Effenterre (Paris: CNRS, 1977); this colloquium best covers the fiscal aspect but

deals with the other two as well. The question of the distribution of land to soldiers and the

families of soldiers comes up in every State and plays an essential role. In one particular form,

it lay the foundation for fiefs and feudalism. But it already lay at the basis of "false fiefs"

around the world, most notably of the clews and cleruchy in Greek civilization. Claire

Preaux, L'economie royale des Lagides (Brussels: Ed. de la Fondation Egyptologique Reine

Elisabeth, 1939), pp. 463ff.

107. Clausewitz, On War, especially book 8, and the commentary on these three theses by

Raymond Aron, Penser la guerre, vol. 1 (particularly pp. 139 ff., "Pourquoi les guerres de la

deuxieme espece?").

108. Erich Ludendorff, Der totale Krieg (Munich: Ludendorff Verlag, 1935), notes that

the evolution has been toward attributing more and more importance to the "people" and

"domestic policies" in war, whereas Clausewitz still puts the emphasis on armies and foreign

policy. This criticism is true overall, despite certain texts of Clausewitz. The same criticism is

also made by Lenin and the Marxists (although they obviously have a totally different concep-

tion of the people and domestic policy than Ludendorff). Certain authors have convincingly

564 □ NOTES TO PP. 421-428

demonstrated that the proletariat is as much of military origin, naval in particular, as of indus-
trial origin; see, for example, Virilio, Speed and Politics, pp. 38, 40-41, 134-35.

109. As John Ulric Nef shows, it was during the great period of "limited war" (1640-1740)

that the phenomena of concentration, accumulation, and investment emerged—the same
phenomena that were later to determine "total war." See War and Human Progress (New
York: Norton, 1968). The Napoleonic code of war represents a turning point that brought
together the elements of total war: mobilization, transport, investment, information, etc.

110. On this "transcending" of fascism, and of total war, and on the new point of inversion

of Clausewitz's formula, see Virilio's entire analysis in L'insecurit'e du terhtoire, especially
chapter 1.

111. Guy Brossollet, Essai sur la non-bataille, pp. 15-16. The axiomatic notion of the

"unspecified enemy" is already well developed in official and unofficial texts on national
defense, on international law, and in the judicial or police spheres.

13. 7000 B.C.: Apparatus of Capture

1. The principal book in this respect is Mitra-Varuna (Paris: Gallimard, 1948) (it also

contains the analysis of the "One-Eyed" and the "One-Armed" gods).

2. The theme of the Binder-God and the magic knot has been the object of general stud-

ies in mythology, notably Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols, trans. Philip Mairet (Kansas
City: Sheed, Andrews, and McMeel, 1961), chapter 3. But these studies are ambiguous
because they use a syncretic and archetypal method. Dumezil's method, on the other hand, is
differential: the theme of capture or of the bond only groups various data together under a dif-
ferential trait, which is constituted precisely by political sovereignty. On the opposition
between these two methods, one can refer to Edmond Ortigues, Le discours et le symbole
(Paris: Aubier, 1962).

3. Dumezil, Mitra- Varuna, pp. 113-114, 151, 202-203.
4. Ibid., p. 150: "There are many ways of being a god of war, and Tiwaz defines one that is

very badly expressed by the labels warrior god, god of combat... . Tiwaz is something else: the
jurist of war, and at the same time a kind of diplomat" (the same applies for Mars).

5. Ibid., pp. 124-132.
6. Ernst Junger, The Glass Bees, trans. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Mayer (New York:

Noonday Press, 1960), p. 112 [translation modified to agree with the French translation cited
by the authors].

7. Marcel Detienne, Les maitres de verite dans la Grece archaique (Paris: Maspero,

1973), and "Le phalange, problemes et controverses," in Problemes de la guerre en Grece
ancienne (Civilisations et societes, no. 11), ed. Jean-Pierre Vernant (The Hague: Mouton,
1968). See also Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought (Ithaca, N. Y: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1982).

8. Jacques Harmand cites an "enterprise using extensive manpower exceptionally

directed by a functionary, Ouni, under the Pharaoh Pepi I toward 1400 B.C."; La guerre
antique (Paris: PUF, 1973), p. 28. Even the military democracy Morgan described does not
explain, but presupposes, an archaic State of the imperial type (the work of Detienne and
Vernant establishes this). This imperial State itself functions first with jailers and police, and
not warriors: see Dumezil, Mitra- Varuna, pp. 200-204.

9. The idea itself of an Asiatic despotic formation appeared in the eighteenth century,

notably in Montesquieu, but was used to describe an evolved state of the empires and corre-
sponded to absolute monarchy. Entirely different is the viewpoint of Marx, who recreates the
notion in order to define the archaic empires. The principal texts in this regard are Marx,

NOTES TO PP. 428-433 □ 565

Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage, 1973), pp. 471-514; Karl Wittfogel,
Oriental Despotism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957); and Pierre

Vidal-Naquet's preface to the first French edition, Le despotisme oriental (Paris: Minuit,

1964), which was surpressed in the second edition at Wittfogel's request; Ferenc Tokei, Essays
on the Asiatic Mode of Production (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1979); and the studies in

CERM, Sur le mode de production asiatique (Paris: Ed. Sociales, 1969).

10. Varron made a famous pun on nexum and nee suumfit ( = the thing does not become

the property of he who receives it). In effect, the nexum is a fundamental form of archaic

Roman law, according to which it is not an accord between contracting parties that creates an

obligation, but the borrower's or donor's word, in a magico-religious mode. This is not a con-

tract (mancipatio), and it involves no buying-selling, even deferred, and no interest, although

it seems to us that it may involve a kind of rent. See in particular Pierre Noailles, Fas et Jus

(Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1948); and Dumezil, who stresses the connection between the
nexum and the magic bond, Mitra-Varuna, pp. 118-124.

11. See the excavations and studies of James Mellaart, Earliest Civilizations in the Near

East (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965) and Catal HuyukQievj York: McGraw-Hill, 1967). The

urbanist Jane Jacobs has drawn on this work in proposing an imperial model she calls "New

Obsidian" (after the name of the lava used to make tools), which may go back to the beginning

of Neolithic times, or even much further into the past. She stresses the "urban" origin of agri-

culture and the role of hybridizations occurring in the urban grain stocks: It is agriculture that

presupposes the stock, and not the reverse. In an as yet unpublished study, Jean Robert ana-

lyzes Mellaart's theses and Jacobs's hypothesis, applying them to new perspectives
(D'ecoloniser Vespace).

12. Clastres, Society against the State, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Urizen, 1977).

We have seen that, according to Clastres, primitive war is one of the principal mechanisms

warding off the State in that it maintains the opposition and dispersion of small segmentary

groups. But also, from this viewpoint, primitive war remains subordinated to these preven-

tive mechanisms and does not become autonomous as a machine, even when it comprises a

specialized body.

13. According to Griaznov, it was the sedentary farmers who went out on the steppe and

became nomadic, during the Bronze Age: This is a case of a zigzag movement in evolution. See
The Ancient Civilization of Southern Siberia, trans. James Hogarth (New York: Cowles,

1969), pp. 97-98, 131-133.

14. Jean Robert develops this notion of an "inversion of signs and messages": "In a first

phase, information circulates principally from the periphery toward the center, but at a cer-

tain critical point, the town begins to emit, in the direction of the rural world, increasingly

imperative messages"; the town becomes an exporter (D'ecoloniser I'espace).

15. On Chinese towns and their subordination to the imperial principle, see Etienne

Balazs, Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy, trans. H. M. Wright (New Haven, Conn.: Yale

University Press, 1964), p. 410: "The social structures in both India and China automatically

rejected the town and offered, as it were, refractory, substandard material to it. It was because

society was well and truly frozen in a sort of irreducible system, a previous crystallization."

16. From all of these standpoints, Francois Chatelet questions the classical notion of the

city-state and doubts that the Athenian city can be equated with any variety of State: "La

Grece classique, la Raison, I'Etat," in Alberto Asor Rosa et al., En marge. L'Occident et ses
"autres", (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1978). Islam was to confront analogous problems, as

would Italy, Germany, and Flanders beginning in the eleventh century; in these cases, politi-

cal power does not imply the State-form. An example is the community of Hanseatic towns,

which lacked functionaries, an army, and even legal status. The town is always inside a net-

work of towns, but, precisely, "the network of towns" does not coincide with "mosaic of

566 □ NOTES TO PP. 433-439

States." On all of these points, see the analyses of Francois Fourquet and Lion Murard, Les
equipements de pouvoir: ville, territoires et equipements collectifs (Paris: 10/18, 1976), pp.

79-106.

17. Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans Claire Jacobson and Brooke

Grundfest Schoeft (New York: Basic Books, 1963), pp. 150-151.

18. Louis Berthe analyzes a specific example of the need for a "third village" to prevent

the directional circuit from closing: "Aines et cadets, l'alliance et la hierarchie chez les Baduj,"
L'Homme, vol. 5, no. 3/4 (July-December 1965), pp. 214-215.

19. Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800, trans. Miriam Kochan

(New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 60), pp. 398,405,411. Emphasis added. (On town-State

relations in the West, see pp. 396-406.) And as Braudel notes, one of the reasons for the victory

of the States over the towns from the beginning of the fifteenth century was that the State

alone had the ability fully to appropriate the war machine: by means of the territorial recruit-

ment of men, material investment, the industrialization of war (it was more in the arms facto-

ries than in the pin factories that mass production and mechanical division appeared). The

commercial towns, on the other hand, required wars of short duration, resorted to mercenar-

ies, and were only able to encast the war machine.

20. This theme is frequently developed by Samir Amin: "Since the theory of relations

between different social formations cannot be an economistic one, international relations,

which belong precisely to this context, cannot give rise to an economic theory." Unequal
Development, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), p. 146.

21. See Jacques Lacarriere, Les hommes ivres de Dieu (Paris: Fayard, 1975).

22. [

TRANS

On capitalism repelling its limits, see Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus,

trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 1983), pp. 230-232.]

23. Samir Amin analyzes this particularity of the "peripheral formations" of the Third

World and distinguishes two principal types, the oriental and African, and the American:

"The Americas, Asia and the Arab world, and Black Africa were not transformed in the same

way because they were not integrated at the same stage of capitalist development at the center

and therefore did not fulfill the same function in development." Unequal Development, p.

295. See also Accumulation on a Worldscale, vol. 2, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly

Review Press, 1974), pp. 390-394. We shall see, however, that under certain conditions the

center and the periphery are determined in such a way as to exchange their characteristics.

24. Gaetan Pirou, Economie liberale et economie dirigee, vol. 1 (Paris: Ed. Sedes,

1946-1947), p. 117: "The productivity of the marginal worker determines not only that

worker's wage but that of all the others, in the same way that, when it was a question of

commodities, the utility of the last bucket of water or last sack of wheat governed the value

not only of that bucket or that sack but of all the other buckets and all the other sacks."

(Marginalism seeks to quantify the assemblage, when in fact all kinds of qualitative factors are

at work in the evaluation of the "last.")

25. On the importance of the theory of evaluation and feeling out for marginalism, see

Jacques Fradin's critical discussion, Les fondements logiques de la th'eorie neoclassique de
I'echange (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1976). For Marxists, there is also a

groping evaluation, but one that can bear only on the quantity of socially necessary labor;

Engels speaks of this precisely in the context of precapitalist societies. He invokes "a process

of zig-zag approximation, often groping back and forth in the dark," which is governed more

or less by the "need for each person to have a rough idea of his costs" (one may wonder if this

last part of the phrase does not reinstate a sort of marginalist criterion). Engels, "Supplement

to Volume Three of Capital," in Marx, Capital, vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Vin-

tage, 1981), p. 1036.

NOTES TO PP. 439-443 □ 567

26. [

TRANS

"Ophelimity" (from the Greek for "useful," "serviceable") was introduced by

Vilfredo Pareto in his Cows d'economie politique (1896), ed. G.-H. Bousquet and G. Busino
(Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1964), pp. 2-16. The first portion of this discussion is translated in
Vilfredo Pareto, Sociological Writings, ed. and intro. S. E. Fine, trans. Derick Mirtin (New
York: Praeger, 1966), pp. 97-102.]

27. David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy, in The Works and Correspon-

dence of David Ricardo, vol. 1, ed. Piero Sraffa (London: Cambridge University Press,
1962), chapter 2. See also Marx's analysis of the two forms of "differential rent," Capital,
vol. 3, part 6.

28. Of course, the least fertile land is also in theory the most recent or the last in a series

(which allows many commentators to say that Ricardo prefigured marginalism in his theory
of rent). But this is not even a rule, and Marx shows that an "increasing sequence" is just as
possible as a "decreasing sequence" and that a better soil can "take the lowest place instead of
that which was formerly the worst." Capital, vol. 3, p. 798.

29. [

TRANS

Capital, vol. 3, p. 788.]

30. Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy, p. 75: "If air, water, the elasticity of

steam, and the pressure of the atmosphere, were of different qualities; if they could be appro-
priated, and each quality existed only in moderate abundance, they, as well as the land, would
afford a rent, as the successive qualities were brought into use."

31. The two forms of differential rent are based on comparison. But Marx maintains the

existence of another form, unknown to the theorists (Ricardo), but with which the practition-
ers, he says, are quite familiar: absolute rent, based on the special character of landed property
as monopoly. In effect, land is not a commodity like the others because it is not reproducible at
the level of a determinable aggregate. There is therefore monopoly, which is not the same as
"monopoly price" (monopoly price, and the eventual corresponding rent, are totally different
questions). In the simplest terms, differential rent and absolute rent can be distinguished in
the following manner: since the price of the product is calculated on the basis of the worst soil,
the entrepreneur with the best soil would have a surplus profit if the latter were not trans-
formed into differential rent accruing to the landowner; but on the other hand, since agricul-
tural surplus value is proportionally greater than industrial surplus value (?), the agricultural
entrepreneur in general would have a surplus profit if the latter were not transformed into
absolute rent accruing to the landowner. Rent is thus a necessary element in the equalization
and adjustment of profit: whether it be the equalization of the agricultural profit rate (differ-
ential rent), or the equalization of this rate and the rate of industrial profit (absolute rent).
Certain Marxist economists have proposed an entirely different schema of absolute rent, but
one that maintains Marx's necessary distinction, [

TRANS

On absolute rent, see Marx, Capital,

vol. 3, part 6, chapter 45, pp. 895-899.]

32. Bernard Schmitt, Monnaie, salaires et profit (Paris: Castella, 1980), pp. 289-290,

distinguishes between two forms of capture or "harnessing," which correspond moreover to
the two principal figures of the hunt, waiting and pursuit. Rent would be a residual or
waiting kind of capture because it depends on external forces and operates by transfer;
profit would be a capture of pursuit or conquest because it derives from a specific action and
requires a force of its own or a "creation." This holds true, however, only in relation to differ-
ential rent; as Marx noted, absolute rent represents the "creative" aspect of landed property
(Capital, vol. 3, p. 889).

33. Edouard Will, Korinthiaka (Paris: Ed. De Boccard, 1955), pp. 470ff, analyzes a late,

but exemplary, case, that of the tyrant Cypselos's reform in Corinth: (1) a portion of the land
belonging to the hereditary aristocracy was confiscated and distributed to the poor peasants;
(2) but at the same time a metallic stock was constituted, through seizure of the property of
proscribed persons; (3) this money itself was distributed to the poor, but in order for them to

568 □ NOTES TO PP. 443-449

give it to the old owners as an indemnity; (4) the old owners from then on paid their taxes in

money, so as to ensure a circulation or turnover of the currency, and an equivalence between

money, goods, and services. We already find analogous figures directly inscribed in the

archaic empires, independently of the problems of private property. For example, land is dis-

tributed to the functionaries in their capacity as functionaries, and they exploit or lease it. But

if the functionary thereby receives a rent in labor or in kind from it, he owes the emperor a tax

payable in money. Hence the necessity of "banks," which, under complex conditions, ensure

the equivalence, conversion, and circulation of goods-money throughout the economy; see

Guillaume Cardascia, "Armee et fiscalite dans la Babylone achemenide," in Armees et
fiscalit'e dans le monde antique (Paris: CNRS, 1977).

34. [

TRANS

On these three forms of rent, see Marx, Capital, vol. 3, part 6, chapter 47,

pp. 925-938.]

35. Authors like Will and Gabriel Ardant have demonstrated that the commercial func-

tion does not account for the origin of money, tied to ideas of "payment," "settlement," "tax-

ation." Will proves this in particular for the Greek and Western worlds; but even in the

oriental empires, we think that the monopoly over monetarized trade assumes monetary

taxation. See Edouard Will, "Reflexions et hypotheses sur les origines du monnayage,"
Revue numismatique, vol. 17 (1955), pp. 3-24; Gabriel Ardant, Histoire financiere de
I'antiquite a nos jours (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), pp. 28ff.: "The milieus that gave rise to taxa-

tion also gave rise to money."

36. On this aspect of indirect taxation, see Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange, trans.

Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), pp. 1-2, 228-236 (in relation to for-

eign trade). Concerning the relations taxation-trade, a particularly interesting case is that of

mercantilism, analyzed by Eric Alliez (Capital et pouvoir, unpublished manuscript).

37. [

TRANS

Marx presents his trinity formula (capital-profit, land-ground rent,

labor-wages) in Capital, vol. 3, chapter 48.]

38. Bernard Schmitt, Monnaie, salaires et profits.

39. Marx often emphasizes the following points, particularly in his analysis of primitive

accumulation: (1) Primitive accumulation precedes the mode of production and makes it pos-

sible. (2) It therefore implies specific action by the State and the law, which are not opposed to

violence but, on the contrary, promote it ("These methods depend in part on brute force....

But they all employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organized force of society."
Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes [New York: Vintage, 1977], chapter 31, p. 915). (3) This

lawful violence appears first in its raw form but ceases to be conscious to the degree that the

mode of production becomes established; it seems to be a fact of nature pure and simple

("direct extra-economic force is still of course used, but only in exceptional cases"; ibid., p.

899). (4) A movement such as this is explained by the particular character of this violence,

which is in no case reducible to theft, crime, or illegality (see Notes surAdolph Wagner in
Oeu-vres de Karl Marx, "Pleiade" edition, vol. 2, ed. Maximilien Rubel [Paris: Gallimard,

1968]): what is taken away from the worker is not something surface level; the capitalist

"does not limit himself to taking away or stealing, but extorts the production of a surplus

value, in other words, he first contributes to the creation of that from which he takes away....

A part of the value created without the labor of the capitalist can be appropriated legally by

the capitalist, in other words, without violating the corresponding right to the exchange of

commodities."

40. Jean Robert thoroughly demonstrates, in this context, that primitive accumulation

implies the violent construction of a homogenized, "colonized" space ("Decoloniser

l'espace," unpublished manuscript).

41. Ferenc Tokei, "Les conditions de la propriete fonciere dans la Chine de l'epoque

Tcheou," Acta Antiqua, vol. 6 (1958), pp. 245-300. Marx and Engels already noted that the

Roman plebs (partially composed of freedmen) alone had the right to the "transfer of property

NOTES TO PP. 449-453 □ 569

out of the ager publicus" (Marx, Grundrisse, p. 477): the plebeians became private owners of
landed property, and also of commercial and industrial wealth, precisely insofar as they were
"excluded from all public rights" (Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the
State [New York: International Publishers, 1972], p. 190).

42. See the two great books by V. Gordon Childe, The Most Ancient East (London: K.

Paul, Trench, Triibner, 1928)and especially The Prehistory of European Civilization (London:
Cassell, 1962). In particular, archaeological analysis permits Childe to conclude that nowhere
in the Aegean world were there accumulations of wealth or food comparable to those of the
Orient (The Prehistory of European Civilization, pp. 106-110).

43. On the differences between "generalized slavery" in the archaic empire, and private

slavery, feudal corvee, etc., see Charles Parain, "Protohistoire mediterraneenne et mode de
production asiatique," in CERM, Sur le mode de production asiatique, pp. 170-173.

44. Gerard Boulvert, Domestique et fonctionnaire sous le haut-empire romain (Paris: Les

Belles Lettres, 1974). More generally, Paul Veyne has analyzed the formation of "subjective
law" in the Roman Empire, the corresponding institutions, and the new meaning of the public
and private. He demonstrates that Roman law is a "law without concepts" that proceeds by
"topics," and in this sense differs from the modern, "axiomatic" conception of the law. See
Veyne, Le pain et le cirque (Paris: Seuil, 1976), chapters 3 and 4, and p. 744.

45. See Francois Hincker, "La monarchic absolue francaise," in CERM, Sur lefeodalisme

(Paris: Ed. Sociaies, 1971).

46. Edgar Quinet, La genie des religions, vol. 1 of Oeuvres Completes (Paris: Hachette,

ca. 1899).

47. Marx, "Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy," in A Contribution to the

Critique of Political Economy, trans. N. I. Stone (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1904), p. 298
[translation modified].

48. On the historical independence of the two series, and their "encounter," see Etienne

Balibar in Althusser and Balibar, Lirele Capital, vol. 2 (Paris: Maspero, 1968), pp. 286-289.

49. Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange, pp. 13-14, and the following passage he cites

from Paul Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1942), p. 338: "'Capital' is not simply another name for means of production; it is means of
production reduced to a qualitatively homogeneous and quantitatively measurable fund of
value" (whence the equalization of profit). In his analysis of the primitive accumulation of
capital, Maurice Dobb (Studies in the Development of Capitalism, rev. ed. [New York: Inter-
national Publishers, 1964], pp. 177-186) effectively demonstrates that primitive accumula-
tion bears not on the means of production but on "rights or titles to wealth" (p. 177; modified
to agree with the French translation cited by the authors), which, depending on the circum-
stances, are convertible into means of production.

50. See the distinction certain jurists make between Roman, "topical," law, and modern,

"axiomatic," law of the civil-code type. We may define certain fundamental ways in which the
French Civil Code is closer to an axiomatic than to a code: (1) the predominance of the
enunciative form over the imperative and over affective formulas (damnation, exhortation,
admonishment, etc.); (2) the code's pretension that it forms a complete and saturated rational
system; (3) but at the same time the relative independence of the propositions, which permit
axioms to be added. On these aspects, see Jean Ray, Essai sur la structure logique du code civil
francais (Paris: Alcan, 1926). It has been established that the systematization of Roman law
took place very late, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

51. [

TRANS

Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. and intro. Dirk J.

Struik, trans. Martin Mulligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), p. 129.]

52. See Jean Saint-Geours, Pouvoir et finance (Paris: Fayard, 1979). Saint-Geours is one

570 □ NOTES TO PP. 453-463

of the best analysts of the monetary system, as well as of "private-public" mixes in the modern

economy.

53. On the tendency toward the elimination of ground rent in capitalism, see Samir Amin

and Kostas Vergopoulos, La questionpaysanne et le capitalisme (Paris: Ed. Anthropos, 1974).

Amin analyzes the reasons why ground rent and rent of mines keep or assume a present-day

meaning in the peripheral regions, although in different ways; The Law of Value and Historical
Materialism, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), chapters 4 and 6.

54. Introductory books on the axiomatic method emphasize a certain number of prob-

lems. For example, Robert Blanche's fine book, L'axiomatique (Paris: PUF, 1959) [abridged

and translated by G. B. Keene as Axiomatics (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962)]. There

is first of all the question of the respective independence of the axioms, and whether or not the

system is saturated, or "strongly complete" (sec. 14 and 15). Second, there is the question of

"models of realization," their heterogeneity, but also their isomorphy in relation to the axio-

matic system (sec. 12). Then there is the possibility of a polymorphy of models, not only in a

nonsaturated system, but even in a saturated axiomatic (sec. 12, 15, and 26). Then, once

again, there is the question of the "undecidable propositions" an axiomatic confronts (sec.

20). Finally, there is the question of "power," by which nondemonstrable infinite sets exceed

the axiomatic (sec. 26 and "the power of the continuum"). The comparison of politics to an

axiomatic is based on all of these aspects.

55. Lewis Mumford, "The First Megamachine," Diogenes, no. 55 (July-September 1966),

p. 3. [translation modified to agree with the French translation cited by the authors].

56. Ergonomics distinguishes between "human-machine" systems (or work posts) and

"humans-machines" systems (communicational aggregates composed of human and

nonhuman elements). But this is not only a difference of degree; the second point of view is

not a generalization of the first: "The notion of information loses its anthropocentric aspect,"

and the problems are not of adaptation but of the choice of a human or nonhuman element

depending on the case. See Maurice de Montmollin, Les systemes hommes-machines (Paris:

PUF, 1967). The issue is no longer to adapt, even under violence, but to localize: Where is your

place? Even handicaps can be made useful, instead of being corrected or compensated for. A

deaf-mute can be an essential part of a "humans-machines" communicational system.

57. One of the basic themes of science fiction is to show how machinic enslavement com-

bines with processes of subjection, but exceeds and differs from them, performing a qualita-

tive leap. Take Ray Bradbury: television not as an instrument located at the center of the

house, but as forming the walls of the house.

58. See Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon ojPower, vol. 2 ofThe Myth ojthe Machine(New

York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), pp. 236-360 (a comparison of the "old

megama-chine" and the modern one; despite writing, the old megamachine notably suffered

from difficulties in "communication").

59. Marx, Manuscripts of 1844, p. 129.

60. Historically, these have been the major problems in axiomatics: "undecidable" prop-

ositions (contradictory statements are also nondemonstrable); the powers of infinite sets,

which by nature elude axiomatic treatment ("the continuum, for example, cannot be con-

ceived axiomatically in its structural specificity since every axiomatization one can give it

will rely on a denumerable model"). See Blanche, L'axiomatique, p. 80.

61. The "intuitionist" school (Brouwer, Heytig, Griss, Bouligand, etc.) is of great impor-

tance in mathematics, not because it asserted the irreducible rights of intuition, or even

because it elaborated a very novel constructivism, but because it developed a conception of
problems, and of a calculus of problems that intrinsically rivals axiomatics and proceeds by

other rules (notably with regard to the excluded middle).

62. In our opinion, one of the best analyses of the Nazi economy is Jean-Pierre Faye's

NOTES TO PP. 463-472 □ 571

Langages totalitaires (Paris: Hermann, 1972), pp. 664-676. Faye shows that Nazism is indeed

a totalitarianism, precisely because of its minimal State, its refusal of any statification of the

economy, its reduction of wages, its hostility toward large-scale public works. But at the same

time, he shows that Nazism carries out the creation of domestic capital, strategic construc-

tion, and the building of an arms industry, which makes it rival or sometimes even meld with

an economy of socialist leaning ("something that seems to resemble the Swedish loans praised

by Myrdal with a view to large-scale projects, but which is in fact and immediately its oppo-

site, the writing of an arms economy and a war economy," and the corresponding difference

between "the public works entrepreneur" and the "army supplier"; pp. 668, 674).

63. See the critical list of the axioms of the periphery presented by Samir Amin, Accumu-

lation on a Worldscale, pp. 390-394.

64. Paul Virilio, L'ins'ecurite du territoire (Paris: Stock, 1975); Speed and Politics, trans.

Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext[e], 1986); Defense populaire et luttes ecologiques

(Paris: Galilee, 1978), forthcoming in English translation from Semiotext(e) as Popular
Defense and Ecological Struggles: it is precisely beyond fascism and total war that the war

machine finds its complete object, in the menacing peace of nuclear deterrence. It is there that

the reversal of Clausewitz's formula takes on a concrete meaning, at the same time as State

politics tends to wither and the war machine takes over a maximum of civil functions ("place

the whole of civil society under the regime of military security," "disqualify the whole of the

planet's habitat by stripping the peoples of their quality of inhabitant," "erase the distinction

between wartime and peacetime"; see the role of the media in this respect). Certain European

police forces could be taken as an example, when they claim the right to "shoot on sight": they

cease to be a cogwheel in the State apparatus and become pieces in a war machine.

65. Braudel shows how this center of gravity formed in northern Europe, but at the out-

come of movements that, starting in the ninth and tenth centuries, put the European spaces of

the North and the South in competition or rivalry with one another (this problem is not to be

confused with that of the town-form and State-form, but does intersect with it). See

"Naissance d'une economie-monde," Urbi, no. 1 (September 1979), pp. 3-20.

66. A movement in Marxist research formed on the basis of the work of Mario Tronti

(Operai e capitate [Turin: G. Einaudi, 1971]; French translation, Ouvriers et capital [Paris:

Bourgois, 1977]), then that of Italian autonomy and Antonio Negri, whose aim was to analyze

the new forms of work and the struggle against work. It was a question of showing simultane-

ously: (1) that the struggle against work is not an accidental or "marginal" phenomenon in

capitalism, but one essential to the composition of capital (the growth in the proportion of

constant capital), and, (2) that this phenomenon engenders a new type of worldwide

struggle—workers' struggles, popular struggles, ethnic struggles—in every domain. See

Antonio Negri, especially Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, ed. Jim Fleming,

trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan, and Maurizion Viano (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and

Garvey, 1984); Karl Heinz Roth, Die "andere" Arbeiterbewegung (Munich: Trikont, 1974);

and the current work in France of Yann Moulier, Alain and Daniele Guillerm, Benjamin

Coriat, etc. [

TRANS

The best sources on the autonomy movement in English are Italy:

Autonomia. Post-Political Politics, Semiotext(e), vol. 3, no. 3 (1980) and Autonomy and the
Crisis. Italian Marxist Texts of the Theory and Praxis of a Class Movement: 1964-1979 (Lon-

don: Red Notes and CSE Books, 1979). Marx Beyond Marx includes a lengthy epilogue by

Michael Ryan summarizing Negri's major works and a bibliography of writings on the Italian

movement available in English.]

67. This is one of the essential theses of Tronti, who defined the new conceptions of the

"mass-worker" and of the relation to work: "To struggle against capital, the working class must

fight against itself insofar as it is capital; this is the maximal stage of contradiction, not forthe

workers, but for the capitalists __ The plan of capital begins to run backward, not as a social

a ., D

572 □ NOTES TO PP. 472-481

development, but as a revolutionary process." See Ouvriers et capital, p. 322; this is what Negri
has called the "crisis of the planning state" (Crisi dello Stato-plano [Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974]).

68. This is another aspect of the present-day situation: in addition to the new struggles

tied to work and the evolution in work, there is the entire domain of what are called "alterna-
tive practices" and the construction of such practices (pirate radio stations would be the
simplest example; other examples are urban community networks, the alternative to psychia-
try, etc.). On all these points, and the link between the two aspects, see Franco Berardi Bifo,
Finalemente il cielo e caduto sulla terra (Milan: Squilibri, 1978); and Les Untorelli,
Re-cherches, no. 30 (1977) (special issue on autonomia).

14.1440: The Smooth and the Striated

1. Andre Leroi-Gourhan, L'homme el la matiere (Paris: Albin Michel, 1971), pp. 244ff.

(and the opposition between fabric and felt).

2. William Faulkner, Sartoris (New York: Random House, 1956), p. 151.
3. On the history of the quilt and patchwork in American immigration, see Jonathan

Holstein, American Pieced Quilts (New York: Viking, 1973) (with reproductions and bibliog-
raphy). Holstein does not claim that the quilt is the principal source of American art, but he
does note the extent to which the "white on white" of plain quilts and patchwork composi-
tions inspired or gave impetus to certain tendencies in American painting: "We can see in
many [quilts] such phenomena as 'op' effects, serial images, use of 'color fields,' deep under-
standing of negative space, mannerisms of formal abstraction and the like," (p. 13).

4. Pierre Boulez, Boulez on Music Today, trans. Susan Bradshaw and Richard Bennett

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 83ff. We provide a summary of
Boulez's analysis in the following paragraph.

5. [

TRANS

Boulez, Boulez on Music Today, p. 87. Translation modified.]

6. On this indexing of the inside and the outside among the nomads of the desert, see

Annie Milovanoff, "La seconde peau du nomade," Nouvelles litteraires, no. 2646 (July 27,
1978), p. 18. And on the relations between the igloo and the outside among the nomads of the
ice, see Edmund Carpenter, Eskimo (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1964).

7. See the two convergent descriptions of the space of ice and the space of sand: Edmund

Carpenter, Eskimo, and Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian Sands (London: Longmans, Green, 1959).
(In both cases, there is an indifference to astronomy.)

8. See Pierre Chaunu's study, L'expansion europeenne du XHIe au XVe siecle (Paris:

PUF, 1969), pp. 288-305.

9. See in particular Paul Adam, "Navigation primitive et navigation astronomique," in

Les aspects internalionaux de la decouverte oceanique aux XVe et XVIe siecles. Ve Colloque
international d'histoire maritime, ed. Michel Mollat and Paul Adam (Paris: SEVPEN, 1960),
pp. 91-112. (See the operative geometry of the pole star.)

10. Guy Beaujouan, "Science livresque et nautique au XVe siecle," Les aspects

interna-tionaux de la decouverte oceanique, pp. 61-90.

11. See Paul Virilio, L'ins'ecurite du territoire (Paris: Stock, 1975), on how the sea

reconstitutes a smooth space with the "fleet in being," etc.; and how a vertical smooth
space of aerial and stratospheric domination springs up (especially chapter 4, "Le littoral
vertical," pp. 93-109).

12. Emmanuel Laroche, Histoire de la racine "Nem " en grec ancien (Paris: Klincksieck,

1949), clearly notes the difference between the ideas of distribution and allocation, between
the two linguistic groups concerned, between the two kinds of space, between the "province"
pole and the "city" pole.

13. This expression is found in Rene Thorn, who applies it to a continuous variation in

NOTES TO PP. 481-493 D 573

which the variable reacts upon its antecedents: Modeles math'ematiques de la morphogenese

(Paris: 10/18, 1974), pp. 218-219.

14. On Riemann's and Helmholtz's presentations of multiplicity, see Jules Vuillemin,

Philosophie de I'algebre (Paris: PUF, 1962), pp. 409ff.

15. See Bertrand Russell, The Principles ofMathematics (New York: Norton, 1964), chapter

31. The following discussion does not conform to Russell's theory. An excellent analysis of the

notions of distance and magnitude according to Meinong and Russell may be found in

Albert Spaier, La pensee et la quantite (Paris: Alcan, 1927).

16. Beginning in chapter 2 of Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of

Consciousness, trans.F. L. Pogson (New York: Macmillan, 1958), Bergson repeatedly uses the

noun "multiplicity," under conditions that should attract the attention of commentators; that

there is an implicit reference to Riemann seems beyond doubt. Later, in Matter and Memory,

trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Humanities Press, 1978), he

explains that Achilles' stride can be divided perfectly into "submultiples" that differ in

nature, however, from that which they divide; the same goes for the tortoise's stride; and the

submultiples, "in both cases," themselves differ in nature.

17. See Bergson, Time and Free Will, p. 82: if a multiplicity "implies the possibility of

treating any number whatever as a provisional unit which can be added to itself, inversely the

units in their turn are true numbers which are as big as we like, but are regarded as provision-

ally indivisible for the purpose of compounding them with one another."

18. Albert Lautman, Les schemas de structure (Paris: Hermann, 1938), pp. 23, 34-35.

19. On this properly Euclidean conjunction (which is very different from the process of

accumulation), see Lautman, ibid., pp. 45-48.

20. Benoit Mandelbrot, Fractals: Form, Chance, and Dimension (San Francisco: W. H.

Freeman, 1977).

21. On these two kinds of space, see Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mythe et pensee chez les Grecs,

vol. 1 (Paris: Maspero, 1971-1974), pp. 174-175.

22. Michel Serres, La naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrece. Fleuves et turbu-

lences (Paris: Minuit, 1977): "Physics is based much more on a vectorial space than on a met-

ric space" (p. 79). On the hydraulic problem, see pp. 104-107.

23. Serres, La naissance de la physique, pp. 35, 135ff.

24. Anne Querrien has clearly demonstrated the importance of the Ecole des Ponts et

Chaussees (School of Bridges and Roadways) in this elaboration of the concept of work. For

example, Navier, an engineer and professor of mechanics, wrote in 1819: "We must establish a

mechanical currency with which to estimate the quantities of work used to accomplish every

kind of fabrication."

25. It is a commonplace of missionaries' narratives that there is nothing corresponding to

the category of work, even in transhumant agriculture, with its laborious ground-clearing

activities. Marshall Sahlins is not content to remark the briefness of the time devoted to the

labor necessary for maintenance and reproduction, but goes on to stress qualitative factors:

the continuous variation that regulates activity, and the mobility or freeness of movement,

which excludes stockpiling and is measured in terms of the "convenience of transporting the

object." "La premiere societe d'abondance," Les temps modernes, no. 268 (October 1968),

pp. 654-656, 662-663, 672-673.

26. The principal texts are Alois Riegl, Die Sp'dtromische Kunstindustrie (Vienna:

Staatdruckerei, 1927); Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy; A Contribution to the
Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock (New York: International Universities Press,

1963); Henri Maldiney, Regard, parole, espace (Lausanne: L'Age d'homme, 1973), especially

"L'art et le pouvoir du fond," and Maldiney's discussion of Cezanne.

27. All of these points already relate to Riemannian space, with its essential relation to

574 D

NOTES TO PP. 493-498

"monads" (as opposed to the unitary Subject of Euclidean space): see Gilles Chatelet, "Sur

une petite phrase de Riemann," Analytiques, no. 3 (May 1979). Although the "monads" are no

longer thought to be closed upon themselves, and are postulated to entertain direct,

step-by-step local relations, the purely monadological point of view proves inadequate and

should be superseded by a "nomadology" (the ideality of striated space versus the realism

of smooth space).

28. See Edmund Carpenter's description in Eskimo of ice space, and of the igloo: "There

is no middle distance, no perpecti ve, no outline, nothing the eye can cling to except thousands

of smokey plumes of snow... a land without bottom or edge ... a labyrinth alive with the

movements of crowded people. No flat static walls arrest the ear or eye ... and the eye can

glance through here, past there" (no pagination).

29. These two aspects, the Encompassing Element and the Center, figure in Jean-Pierre

Vernant's analysis of space in Anaximander; Mythe et penseee chez les Grecs (Paris: Maspero,

1971-1974), vol. 1, part 3. From another perspective, the entire history of the desert concerns

the possibility of its becoming the encompassing element, and also of being repelled, rejected

by the center, as though in an inversion of movement. In a phenomenology of religion like that

of Van der Leeuw, the nomos itself does indeed appear as the encompassing-limit or ground,

and also as that which is repelled, excluded, in a centrifugal movement.

30. Whatever interactions there may be, the "art of the steppes" had a specificity that was

communicated to the migrating Germans; in spite of his many reservations about nomad cul-

ture, Rene Grousset makes this point in The Empire of the Steppes, trans. Naomi Walford

(New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1970). pp. 11 -25. He notes the irreducibility

of Scythian art to Assyrian art, Sarmatian art to Persian art, and Hunnic art to Chinese art. He

even points out that the art of the steppes influenced more than it borrowed (see in particular

the question of Ordos art and its relations to China).

31. On this question of light and color, in particular in Byzantine art, see Henri Maldiney,

Regard, parole, espace, pp. 203ff., 239ff.

32. The correlation, "haptic-close-abstract," was already suggested by Riegl. But it

was Worringer who developed the theme of the abstract line. Although he conceives of it

essentially in its Egyptian form, he describes a second form in which the abstract assumes

an intense life and an expressionist value, all the while remaining inorganic: Abstraction
and Empathy, chapter 5, and especially Form in Gothic (London: Putnam's and Sons,

1927), pp. 38-55.

33. Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Legesteet la parole (Paris: Albin Michel, 1964-1965), vol. 1,

Technique et langage, pp. 263ff.; vol. 2, La m'emoire et les rythmes, pp. 219ff. ("Rhythmic

marks are anterior to explicit figures.") Worringer's position is very ambiguous; thinking that

prehistoric art is fundamentally figurative, he excludes it from Art, on the same grounds as he

excludes the "scribblings of a child" (Abstraction and Empathy, pp. 51-55). Then he advances

the hypothesis that the cave dwellers were the "ultimate result" of a series he says began with

the abstract (p. 130). But would not such a hypothesis force Worringer to revise his conception

of the abstract, and to cease identifying it with Egyptian geometricism?

34. Worringer establishes an opposition between the power of repetition, which is

mechanical, multiplying, and without fixed orientation, and the force of symmetry, which is

organic, additive, oriented, and centered. He sees this as the fundamental difference between

Gothic ornamentation and Greek or classical ornamentation: Form in Gothic, pp. 53-55

("The Ceaseless Melody of the Northern Line"). In a fine book, Esthetiques d'Orient et
d'Occident (Paris: E. Leroux, 1937), Laura Morgenstern develops a particular example, dis-

tinguishing the "symmetrical antithetism" of Sassanid Persian art from the "disjointed

antithetism" of the art of the prdto-Iranian nomads (Sarmatians). Many authors, however,

have stressed the centered and symmetrical motifs in barbarian or nomad art. Worringer

NOTES TO PP. 498-499 □ 575

anticipated this objection: "Instead of the regular and invariably geometrical star or rosette or

similar restful forms, in the North we find the revolving wheel, the turbine or the so-called sun

wheel, all designs which express violent movement. Moreover, the movement is peripheral

and not radial" (Form in Gothic, p. 54). The history of technology confirms the importance of

the turbine in the life of the nomads. In another, bio-aesthetic, context, Gabriel Tarde opposes

repetition as indefinite potential (puissance) to symmetry as limitation. With symmetry, life

constituted an organism for itself, taking a star-shaped or reflected, infolded form (the radiata

and mollusks). It is true that in doing so it unleashed another type of repetition, external

reproduction; see L 'opposition universale (Paris: Alcan, 1897).

35. [

TRANS

Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, p. 33]

36. [

TRANS

Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, p. 42]

37. On all of these points, see Georges Charriere's very intuitive book, Scythian Art (New

York: Alpine Fine Arts Collection, 1979), which includes a great number of reproductions. It

is doubtless Rene Grousset who has most effectively emphasized "slowness" as a dramatic

pole of nomad art: The Empire of the Steppes, pp. 13-14.

38. Dora Vallier, in her preface to the French translation of Abstraction and Empathy

(Abstraction et Einfuhlung [Paris: Klincksieck, 1978]), is right to note Worringer and

Kandinsky's independence from one another, and the differences between the problems they

were addressing. However, she maintains that there is still convergence and resonance

between them. In a sense, all art is abstract, with the figurative springing from certain types of

abstraction. But in another sense, since there are very different types of lines

(Egyptian-geometrical, Greek-organic, Gothic-vital, etc.), the question then becomes one of

determining which line remains abstract, or realizes abstraction as such. It is doubtful that

it is the geometrical line, since it still draws a figure, even though an abstract and

nonrepresentative one. Rather, the abstract line is that defined by Michael Fried in relation to

certain works by Pollock: multidirectional, with neither inside nor outside, form nor

background, delimiting nothing, describing no contour, passing between spots or points,

filling a smooth space, stirring up a close-lying haptic visual matter that "both invites the act of

seeing on the part of the spectator yet gives his eye nowhere to rest once and for all," (Three
American Painters [Cambridge, Mass.: Fogg Art Museum, 1965], p. 14). In Kandinsky

himself, abstraction is realized not so much by geometrical structures as by lines of march

or transit that seem to recall Mongolian nomadic motifs.

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by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

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"Le nouvel arpenteur. Intensites et blocs d'enfance dans 'le Chateau.'" Critique, vol. 29, no.

318 (November 1973), pp. 1046-1054.

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Chapter 2 of Mille Plateaux.

BIBLIOGRAPHY □ 581

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English

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"Intellectuals and Power." Discussion with Michel Foucault in Foucault, Language,

Counter-Memory, Practice. Ed. and trans. Donald Bouchard. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
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"On Four Poetic Formulas Which Might Summarize the Kantian Philosophy." Preface to

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"Plato and the Simulacrum." Trans. Rosalind Krauss. October, no. 16 (Winter 1983), pp.

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"The Schizophrenic and Language: Surface and Depth in Lewis Carroll and Antonin Artaud."

In Textual Strategies. Ed. and trans. Josue Harari. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
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"Three Group Problems." Trans. Mark Seem. Semiotext(e), Anti-Oedipus, vol. 2, no. 3 (1977),

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582 D BIBLIOGRAPHY

French

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Cinema II:L'image-temps. Paris: Minuit, 1985.

David Hume, la vie, son oeuvre. Paris: PUF, 1952. Extracts from Hume with an introduction

by Deleuze and Andre Cresson. Dialogues. With Claire

Parnet. Paris: Flammarion, 1977. Difference et Repetition.
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Francis Bacon. Logique de la Sensation. 2 vols. Paris: Ed. de la Difference, 1981.
Instincts et Institutions. Paris: Hachette, 1953. Texts selected by Deleuze.
Logique du sens. Paris: Minuit, 1969.

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of "Un nouvel archiviste." La philosophie

critique de Kant. Paris: PUF, 1963.

Presentation de Sacher-Masoch. Paris: Minuit, 1967. Rpt. Paris: 10/18, 1971. Lengthy
introduction by Deleuze with the text of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's La Venus a lafourrure.
Proust et les signes. Paris: PUF, 1964. Augmented 2nd ed., 1970. Spinoza et le probleme
de I'expression. Paris: Minuit, 1968.

Spinoza. Philosophie pratique. Paris: PUF, 1970. Augmented 2nded. Paris: Minuit, 1981.
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an essay on Bene by Deleuze entitled "Un manifeste de moins." I "A propos des

nouveaux philosophes et d'un probleme plus general." Le Monde, June 19-20,

1977, p. 16. Reprinted Recherches, Les Untorelli, no. 30 (November 1977), pp. 179-184.

Interview from June 5, 1977. P "L'ascension du social." Postface to Jacques

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1977, pp. 220. "Capitalisme et schizophrenic" L'Arc, Deleuze, no. 49 (1972; 2nd ed.,

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Interview with Catherine Bakis-Clement from March 2, 1972. "La conception de la

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peut servir a des mathematiciens ou meme a des musiciens, meme et

surtout quand elle ne parte pas de musique ou de mathematiques," in Vincennes, ou le

d'esir d'apprendre. Ed. Pierre Merlin. Paris: Alain, Moreau, 1979, pp. 120-121. "Faille et

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32-34. Review of Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (The Order of Things). I

"Huit ans apres." L'Arc, Deleuze, no. 49 (1972; 2nd ed., 1980), pp. 99-102. Interview with

Catherine Clement from 1980.

BIBLIOGRAPHY □ 583

"Hume." In Laphilosophie, ed. Francois Chatelet. Paris: Hachette, 1979. Vol. 2, pp. 226-239. I
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cussion with Michel Foucault. I      Interview. Liberation. October 23, 1980, pp. 16-17. I
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Introduction to Johann Malfatti von Monteregio, Etudes sur la mathese, ou anarchie et
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reprinted as an appendix to Logique du sens. "Lettre a Michel Cressole," in Michel

Cressole, Deleuze. Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1973,

pp. 107-118. Translated as "I Have Nothing to Admit." "Lucrece et le naturalisme."
Etudes philosophiques, series 16, no. 1 (Jan.-March 1961), pp. 19-29. Modified and
reprinted under the title "Lucrece et le simulacre" as an appendix to Logique du sens.
"Lucrece et le simulacre." See "Lucrece et le naturalisme." "Methode de dramatisation."
Bulletin de la Soci'ete Francaise de Philosophie, vol. 61, no. 3

(July-September 1967), pp. 89-118. Presentation followed by discussion.

"Michel Tournier et le monde sans autrui." See "Une theorie d'Autrui."
"Mystere d'Ariane." Etudes nietzscheennes (1963).

"Nous croyons au caractere constructiviste de certaines agitations de gauche." Recherches,
Les Untorelli, no. 30 (November 1977), pp. 149-150. Statement on repression in Italy written
by Deleuze and signed by a number of French Intellectuals, September 20, 1977. "Un
nouvel archiviste." Critique, no. 274 (March 1970), pp. 195-209. Review of Michel

Foucault, L 'archeologie du savoir. Modified and reprinted in Foucault, pp. 11-30. "Pensee
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Deleuze to the Colloque de Cerisy (1972), with discussion. "Philosophie et minorite."
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choses," Cahiers du Cinema, no. 352 (October 1983),

pp. 35-40. Interview with Pascal Bonitzer and Jean Narboni. "Platon et le simulacre." See

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pouvoir chez Spinoza. Paris: PUF,

1981, pp. 9-12. P Preface to Guy Hocquenghem. L'apres-mai desfaunes. Paris: Grasset,
1974, pp. 7-17. P "Qu'est-ce que c'est, tes 'machines desirantes' a toi?" Les Temps
Modernes, no. 316 (November 1972), pp. 854-856. Introduction to Pierre Benichou, "Saint
Jackie, Comedienne et Bourreau." "A quoi reconnait-on le structuralisme?" In La
philosophie. Ed. Francois Chatelet. Paris: Hachette, 1979. Vol. 4, pp. 293-339. (Abridged
version of Histoire de la philosophie. 8 volumes. Paris: Hachette, 1972-1973.) "Renverser le
platonisme (les simulacres)," RevuedeM'etaphysique et de Morale, vol. 71, no. 4

584 □ BIBLIOGRAPHY

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74, no. 2 (April-June 1970), pp. 426-437.

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English

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1984. A selection of essays from Psychanalyse et transversalite and the two versions of La
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Index

Compiled by Hassan Melehy

Adam, Paul: 572 n. 9

Aesthetics: and smooth and striated space,

492-99. See also Art; Epistemology

Affect: and becoming-animal, 258-59; and

body, 260-61; definition of, xvi; and

haeccity, 261-62; and war machine, 400.

See also Spinoza, Baruch Afrikaans: as

major language, 102 Agriculture: West as,

18 Aguirre, the Wrath of God: 126 A la
recherche du temps perdu: 271-72, 289,

319 Alembert's equation: 335 Alliez,

Eric: 568 n. 36 Alphandery, Paul: 520 n.

23, 557-58 n. 59 Althusser, Louis: 130, 536

n. 6 Amado, Jorge: 553 n. 13 Amalrik,

Andrei: 470 America: as flow, 20; as

rhizome, 19 Amin, Samir: 566 n. 23, 570

n. 53; and

capitalist axiomatic, 465, 469; and social

formation, 435-36 Analogy: and

representational thinking,

xi-xii; and resemblance, 236-37. See also

Representation "And": and linguistic

variation, 99; vs. "to

be," 25, 98 Anti-Oedipus: xi, 3, 566

n. 22 Aphorism: as plateau, 23

Arborescent schema: and becoming,

293-94; critique of, xii-xiii; of evolution,

10-11; as hierarchy, 16-17; of language,

92-95; and line and point, 293-94; and

rhizome, 6-7, 20, 34, 328-29, 506; and

segmentarity, 211-12; and territorial

assemblage, 327-28; of thought, 15-17;

and tracing, 15, 20; and writing, 5-7. See

also Rhizome; State apparatus;

Stratification Archimedes: and nomad

science, 361-63 Architecture: and

consistency, 329; and

State science, 364-65. See also

Geometry; Science Ardant, Gabriel: 568

n. 35 Ardant, Will: 568 n. 35 Aristotle: and

war machine, 417 Arithmetic: see

Mathematics Arland, Marcel: 195 Aron,

Raymond: 563 nn. 104, 107 Arrow,

Kenneth: 519 n. 14, 544 n. 80 Art: and

becoming, 316-17; and nomad,

401-2; salvation through, 185-87; and

smooth and striated space, 492-99; and

territory, 320-21 Artaud: 542 n. 48;

and body without

organs, 150, 158-59, 160, 162-63; and

drugs, 285; and nomad thought, xiii; and

thought, 377-78 Artisan: and flow of

matter, 409; and

metallurgy, 411-12 Artist: and

population, 345-46. See also Art Asimov,

Isaac: 540 n. 23 Assemblage: and

becoming, 306; and

becoming-animal, 242, 257-60; and body

without organs, 156, 157-58; book as, 4;

collective, of enunciation, 80, 85, 88; and

consistency, 331-34; and content and

expression, 88-89, 504-5; and

589

590 □ INDEX

deterritorialization, 333-34, 504-5; of

enunciation, 83, 87; and exchange,

437-41; and faciality, 180-81; and form

and matter, 340; and haeccity, 262-63;

and incorporeal transformation, 82; and

language, 109-10; libidinal, 37; and

linguistic variation, 99-100; and

machine, 343-44, 510-14; molecular,

213; and multiplicity, 8, 22-23, 34; and

order-word, 108-10; and refrain, 312,

323-27; and regime of signs, 119, 121-22,

140-41; and State apparatus, 513; and

stratification, 503-5; and subject,

264-65; and subjedification, 130, 134;

territorial, 323-27, 332-34, 503-5; and

unconscious, 35; and war machine,

398-403, 406-7, 513. See also Machine;

Machinic assemblage; Multiplicity;

Plane of consistency

Atomic bomb: and war machine, 404-5.

See also Weapon

Attila: and war machine, 417

Aurevilly, Barbey d': 193-94

Austin, J. L.: 77

Autran, Charles: 530 n. 22

Axiomatic: capitalist, 454-73 passim; and

diagrammatic, 143-44; and State

apparatus, 460-73 passim; and

stratification, 57. See also Capitalism;

State apparatus

Bach, Johann Sebastian: 511

Bachelard,Gaston:236,238,313,555n.32

Badiou, Alain: 537 n. 20

Baer, Karl Ernst von: 46-47, 53, 254

Baillon, M. H.: 520 n. 20

Bailly, Jean-Christophe: 521 n. 25

Bakhtin, Mikhail: 82, 523 n. 5, 524 n. 10,

525 n. 21 Balandier, Georges: 535 n. 4

Balazs, Etienne: 565 n. 15 Balibar,

Etienne: 569 n. 48 Balmes, Francois: 537

n. 20 Balzac, Honore de: 266 Bamberger,

J.-R: 523 n. 5 Bantu dialects: 102 Barnes,

Mary: 138 Barraque, Jean: 532 n. 3, 545 n.

87, 550 n.

48, 551 n. 51 Barthes, Roland: 533

n. 7, 545 n. 88

Bartok, Bela: 342; and refrain, 349-50

Basaglia, Franco: x

Bataille, Georges: 383

Bateson, Gregory: 543 n. 62; and intensity,

158; and plateau, iv, 21-22

Battle: and war machine, 416-23. See also

War

Beaufret, Jean: 529 n. 18

Beaujouan, Guy: 572 n. 10

Beckett, Samuel: 97-98, 199; and faciality,

173; and territorial assemblage, 503

Becoming: and abstract machine, 252; and

arborescence, 293-94; and assemblage,

306; and causality, 283-84; and

deterritorialization, 291-92, 306-7; and

drugs, 282-86; and haeccity, 280; and

heterogeneity, 10; of major and minor

languages, 104-6; and majority and

minority, 291-93; and man, 291-93; and

memory, 291-98; molecular nature of,

292-93; and music, 299-309; and plane

of consistency, 251-52, 507; and

pragmatics, 251; and refrain, 350; and

rhizome, 238-39, 251, 294; and

schizoanalysis, 251; and secret, 287-90;

and sexuality, 275-79; and stratification,

502-3; and structuralism, 237-38; and

transformation, 250-51; and war

machine, 277-78

Becoming-animal: and assemblage, 242-43,

257-59; of child, 14; and faciality,

115-16, 176, 187; and line, 245; and

masochism, 155-56; and molecule,

272-75; and multiplicity, 239-52 passim;

and music, 304-5, 308-9; and plane of

consistency, 258-59; and psychoanalysis,

259-60; and resemblance, 233-35; and

State apparatus, 242-43; and

stratification, 53; and transformation,

252-53; and war machine, 242-43,

247-48, 396; and writing, 240

Beethoven, Ludwig van: 95, 270, 511; and

refrain, 348

Being: and State philosophy, xii-xiii

Bellini, Vincenzo: 307

Bene, Carmelo: and linguistic variation, 98

Bennet, E. A.: 521 ch. 2 n. 3

Benveniste, Emile: xviii, 78, 82, 130, 541

n.42, 554 n. 25

Benveniste, R. E.: 10

INDEX □ 591

Berg, Alban: 339, 552 n. 61

Bergson, Henri: x, 237-39, 374, 483-84,

486, 573 n. 17 Berio, Luciano:

96,342,545 n. 87,546 n. 91 Berlioz, Hector:

342 Bernoulli: and State science, 363

Bernstein, I. S.: 553 n. 14 Berthe, Louis:

536 n. 9, 566 n. 18 Bettelheim, Bruno: 542

n. 57, 543 n. 62 Bible, the: and book, 127;

King James, 529

n. 16; numbers in, 118; and reality, 129;

and subjectification, 131. See also

Christ; Christianity; Religion Bifo,

Franco Berardi: 572 n. 68 Binary

relations: and arborescent schema,

5; and faciality, 176-80; and multiplicity,

5; and segmentarity, 210 Biochemistry:

and stratification: 45-46,

49-50 Biology: and stratification, 46-48.

See also

Science Bizet, Georges: 269; and refrain,

350 Black English: 93-94, 102-5 Black

hole: and assemblage, 333-34; and

consciousness, 133; and faciality, 167-91

passim; and line of flight, 224; and

refrain, 312; and segmentarity, 211; and

stratification, 40, 56; and

subjectification, 167-68. See also White

wall Black Panthers: and becoming, 291

Blanche, Robert: 570 nn. 54, 60 Blanchot,

Maurice: xiii, 265, 538 n. 29, 541

n. 43, 556 n. 44 Bloch, Jules: 562

n. 99 Block: and becoming, 294, 299;

and

content and expression, 299. See also

Flow; Line of flight "Blumfeld": 169

Body: and affect, 256-57; and cartography,

260-61; and faciality, 115-16, 170-72,

176, 181; and haeccity, 260-61; and

language, 80, 86; and machinic

assemblage, 89, 90; and number, 391-92;

and order-word, 107-8; and

representation, 86; and State apparatus,

366-67. See also Faciality; Organ;

Organism Body without organs: 149-66

passim; and

assemblage, 4, 157-58; and

becoming-animal, 156; and

becoming-woman, 276-77; and

deterritorialization, 156-57, 161; and

faciality, 171-72; and God, 150, 158-59;

and intensity, 153, 157-58, 161, 164-65;

and line, 203; and map, 12, 163-64; and

metallurgy, 411; and multiplicity, 30,

154; and organism, 4, 30, 158-59; and

plane of consistency, 72, 154-55, 158,

159, 165-66, 270, 506-8; and plateau,

158; and psychoanalysis, 151, 165; and

schizoanalysis, 165; and signifiance,

159-61; and smooth space, 479; and

stratification, 56, 159-63; and

subjectification, 134, 159-61; and

unconscious, 30; and Wolf-Man, 31. See
also Organ; Organism

Bolero: 271

Bolsheviks: 38, 88, 100, 139

Bonnard, Pierre: 175

Book: American and European, 19; and

arborescent schema, 5-7; and

assemblage, 22-23; classical, 5;

composition of, 3-4; and

deterritorialization, 3-4, 11, 126-27;

modern, 5-6; and multiplicity, 9; and

plateau, 22; and representation, 22-23;

and rhizome, 11, 22-23; and signifiance,

126-27; and tracing, 24; and world, 5-6,

11. See also Writing

Borderline: and becoming, 245-46, 249-53.

See also Line

Borges, Jorge Luis: 125, 241

Boulez, Pierre: 262, 267, 269, 296, 518 n.

22, 519 n. 8, 527 n. 39, 541 n. 36, 548 n.

14, 553-54 n. 20; and smooth and

striated space, 477-78

Bouligand, Georges: 554 n. 21, 556 n. 40,

570 n. 61

Boulte, Nicolas: 537 n. 20

Boulvert, Gerard: 569 n. 44

Bourdieu, Pierre: 524-25 n. 13

Bradbury, Ray: 541 n. 37, 570 n. 57

Brain: as population, 64; as rhizome,

15-16. See also Consciousness; Thought

Braudel, Fernand: 434, 468, 558 n. 60,

558-59 n. 64, 561 n. 79

Brehier, Emile: 525 n. 18

Brekle, Herbert: and linguistic competence,

592 □ INDEX

Brelet, Gisele: 547 n. 102, 551 n. 50; and

refrain, 349-50 Breytenbach, Breyten:

527 n. 38 Broglie, Louis de: 143 Bronte,

Charlotte: 261 Brossolet, Guy: 520 n. 15,

563 n. 104, 564

n. Ill Brouwer, L. E. J.: 570 n. 61

Brownian motion: and crowd, 30; as

fractal, 487; and multiplicity, 33. See also

Mathematics; Physics; Science Brunhoff,

Suzanne de: 538 n. 27 Brunschvicg, Leon:

554 n. 23 Brunswick, Ruth Mack: and

Wolf-Man, 26,

31, 35. See also Freud, Sigmund;

Psychoanalysis

Biichner, Georg: 25

Buddha: and rhizome, 20. See also Religion

Bureaucracy: of East and West, 19-20; and

segmentarity, 210, 214; and

subjectification, 132; and tracing, 15. See

also State apparatus Burroughs, William

S.: 6, 152, 531 n. 14,

532 n. 8 Butor, Michel:

546 n. 89

Cage, John: 267, 269, 344, 545 n. 87

Calame-Griaule, Genevieve: 539-40 n. 21

Caldwell, Erskine: 520 n. 18 Calling of
Saint Peter and Saint Andrew,

The: 185 Canetti, Elias: 33-34, 107-8,

214, 525 n. 17 Canguilhem, Georges: 522 n.

9, 539 n. 13 Cannibalism: and presignifying

regime,

118 Capgras, Joseph: 119-20 Capitalism:

axiomatic of, 454-73 passim; and

deterritorialization, 453-56; and rhizome,

20; and social formation, 436-37; and

smooth and striated space, 490-92; and

State apparatus, 434-35, 447-48, 452-59;

and war, 421. See also Axiomatic; State

apparatus Capture: and State apparatus,

424-73

passim Cardascia, Guillaume: 568 n. 33

Carnot, Nicolas: and State science, 363

Carpenter, Edmund: 557 n. 56, 572 nn. 6-7,

574 n. 28 Carriere, Mathieu: 542 n.

50, 553 n.l 1

Carroll, Lewis: 76, 437 Cartography:

and body, 260-61; and

rhizome, 12-15. See also Map Castaneda,

Carlos: 138-39, 227-28, 248-49,

282, 519 n. 7, 556 n. 38; and body

without organs, 161-62 Castle, The: 132

Causality: and evolution, 431; and plane of

consistency, 283-84 Cellular

chemistry: and double

articulation, 42; and stratification,

58-60. See also Science Center: and

multiplicity, 17-18; and

segmentarity, 209-10; and stratification,

50-52. See also Circle Certeau, Michel

de: 527 n. 36 Cezanne, Paul: 343, 347, 493

Chabrier, Emmanuel: and refrain, 350

Charles, Daniel: 542 n. 51, 545 n. 87

Charriere, Georges: 561 n. 82, 575 n. 37

Chasles, Michel: 554 n. 28 Chatelet,

Francois: 461, 565-66 n. 16 Chatelet,

Gilles: 574 n. 27 Chatrian, Alexandre: 246

Chaunu, Pierre: 558 n. 60; and smooth

space, 479-80 Chauvin, Remy: 10,

522 n. 15 Chekhov, Anton: 206

Cheng, Francois: 280, 542 n. 45

Chevalier, Louis: 558 n. 61 Childe, V.

Gordon: 563 n. 101; and

metallurgy, 412, 415; and State

apparatus, 428-29,450-51 Chomsky,

Noam: 524 n. 7, 530 n. 38; and

Black English, 102; and grammatical

tree, 5, 7, 12, 15,91,92, 101, 148; and

Labov, 93-94; and minor language, 103;

and regime of signs, 141 Chopin,

Frederic: 271 Christ: 124, 301, 533 n. 7;

and faciality,

176-79, 182, 184-85, 187, 189; and

incorporeal transformation, 81. See also

Bible, the; Christianity; Religion

Christen, Yves: 518-19 n. 5 Christianity:

semiotic of, 125; translation

of, 137. See also Christ; Religion

Chromaticism: and linguistics, 95-100. See

also Music; Painting Chronochromie:

320 Church: and becoming-animal,

247-48;

INDEX □ 593

and segmentarity, 218. See also

Christianity; Religion CIA: and war

machine, 403 Ciguri: 160 Cinema I: 518

n. 21 Cinema II: 518 n. 21 Circle: and

segmentarity, 208-11; and sign,

117. See also Center; Geometry City:

and smooth and striated space, 481.

See also Town Cixous, Helene: xii

Clairvaux, Bernard de: 364 Classicism:

and form and substance, 338 Clastres,

Helene: 553 n. 15 Clastres, Pierre: 528 n.

7, 557 n. 58; and

evolutionism, 429; and war machine,

357-59 Clausewitz, Karl von: 218, 559 n.

68, 571

n, 64; and State apparatus, 355; and war,

419-21,467 Cleisthenes: and State

apparatus, 211-12 Clement, Catherine:

Deleuze's interview

with, 517 n. 2 Clement, Pierre: 562 n.

98 Clerambault, Gatian: 119-20, 128

Cline, W. B.: 562 n. 98 Coding: and

articulation, 41; and faciality,

170; and music, 11-12; and rhythm,

313-14; and segmentarity, 222-24; and

State apparatus, 427-28, 434, 448-51,

459-60; and stratification, 40, 52-55; and

substance, 41; and territory, 322; and

tools, 60-61; and translation, 52-53. See

also Language; Signifiance Cogito: and

subjectivity, 128, 130-32. See

also Self (Mot) Communication: and

language, 75-79, 85.

See also Information; Information

science Compars: and royal science,

369-70. See

also Dispars Composition: see

Consistency Computer science: and

arborescent

schema, 16. See also Information

science; Science; Technology Concept:

and identity, xi; line as, 22; and

State philosophy, xii-xiii. See also

Epistemology; Idea; Thought

Consciousness: and subjectification,

131-32, 134. See also Epistemology;

Subjectivity; Thought Consistency: and

assemblage, 327-28,

331-34; and deterritorialization, 336-37;

and expression, 329-33; and

heterogeneity, 328-31; and music, 343;

and plateau, xiv; and State apparatus,

431-32, 434-35; and stratification,

335-37. See also Assemblage;

Heterogeneity;-Multiplicity; Plane of

consistency; Stratification Constant:

linguistic, 92, 93-94; and minor

language, 101-10. See also Linguistics;

Variation Content: and abstract machine,

511-12;

and articulation, 44, 64; and assemblage,

88-89, 504-5; and block, 299; and

deterritorialization, 87-89, 108-10, 307;

and diagrammatic, 142-45; and

expression, 44-45, 111; and form, 43-44;

and language, 85-91; molecular nature

of, 57-58; and nomad science, 369; and

sign, 117; and stratification, 43, 57,

60-73 passim, 502-3; and variation, 94.

See also Expression, Form; Linguistics;

Matter; Substance Cooper, David: 525

n. 16 Coriat, Benjamin: 571 n. 66

Cosmos: and deterritorialization, 326-27,

337; and modernity, 342-43 Cotard,

Jules: 531 n. 2 Courtship: and territory,

324-25. See also

Love; Sexuality Cousteau,

Jacques: 549 n. 26 "Crack-up,

The": 198-200 Cricket on the
Hearth, The: 175 Cromwell,

Oliver: 125 Crowd: and

multiplicity, 30; and

romanticism, 341 Crusades, the: and

assemblage, 89; and

flow, 220-21; and history, 23-24; and war

machine, 383-84. See also Christianity;

Religion Crystallization: and

stratification, 49-50;

57-60 Cuenot, Lucien: 548 n. 21

Cummings, E. E.: and linguistic variation,

99 Cuvier, Georges: 46-47, 53,

254

Daisy Miller: 290

594 □ INDEX

Dalcq, Albert: 531-32 n. 7

Dali, Salvador: 27

Darien, Georges: 523 n. 2

Darius: 122

Darwin, Charles: 46-49, 234. See also

Evolution

Daudin, Henri: 538 n. 1

Debussy, Claude: 270-71, 299, 319, 341-43,

545 n. 87; and becoming, 308; and

faciality, 169; and refrain, 303, 347

Decalcomania: and rhizome, 12-15. See

also Map; Tracing

Decoding: see Coding

Deconstruction: and feminism, xii

Delage, Roger: 551-52 n. 59

Deleuze, Gilles: ix-x; and Guattari, xi-xv

Deligny, Fernand: 14, 202-3, 547 n. 1

Democritus: 361; and smooth space,

363-64, 489; and State science, 363. See
also Lucretius; Molecule

De Niro, Robert: and becoming-animal,

274

Derrida, Jacques: xi, 555 n. 32; and war

machine, 417

Desargues, Gerard: 363, 365

Descartes, Rene: 128, 530 n. 32

Desire: and assemblage, 399-400; and body

without organs, 154-55, 165; and

psychoanalysis, 13; and segmentarity,

215. See also Libido; Love; Sexuality

Despot: as flow, 19-20; and signifying

regime, 116-17. See also State apparatus

Dessert, Daniel: 555 n. 30

Detective novel: as literary genre, 192-93

Deterritorialization: and abstract machine,

142-45; and assemblage, 333-34, 504-5;

and becoming, 291-92, 306-7; and body

without organs, 156-57, 161; and book,

126; and capitalism, 453-56; and

consistency, 336-37; and content and

expression, 87-89, 108-10, 307; and

faciality, 172, 174-91 passim; and flow,

219-21, 226; and language, 61-63; and

line, 203-5; and line of flight, 510; and

map tracing, 15; and multiplicity, 9, 32,

33; and music, 301-3; and nomads,

381-84; and novella, 195-200; and plane

of consistency, 70-71, 270, 272; and

population, 123-25, 345-46; and refrain,

300-302, 347-48; and regime of signs,

141-43, 508; and rhizome, 9-10, 21; and

science, 372; and segmentarity, 222-24;

and semiotic, 135, 138-39; and sign,

67-68, 112, 113, 115-17, 121-23; and

State apparatus, 432-34; and

stratification, 53-57; and

subjectification, 133; and substance, 41;

and variation, 99-100; and war machine,

353. See also Line of flight; Nomads;

Territory Detienne, Marcel: 399, 426,

556 n. 41, 560

n. 78 Devaux, Emile: 522-23 n. 24, 533

n. 6 Devil, the: and becoming-animal, 239,

252-53 Dhorme, Edouard:

529 n. 12 Diaboliques: 194

Diagrammatic: 141 -48. See also Axiomatic

Dialect: and major language, 101-3
Dialogues: 517 Dickens, Charles: 175

Dieterlen, Germaine: 563 n. 102
Difference et repetition: x, 517 n. 4 Dillard,

J. L: 527 n. 39 Dimension: and becoming,

251-52; of

multiplicity, 8-9. See also Geometry;

Space Discourse: direct, 84; indirect,

76-77, 80,

84, 99-100. See also Language;

Linguistics Dislocation, La: I'i-l^

Dispars: and nomad science, 370-71. See

also Compars DNA: and evolution, 10

Dobb, Maurice: 537 n. 19, 569 n. 49

Domination: and language, 101, 105-6

Dos Passos, John: 520 n. 18 Dostoyevsky,

Fyodor: 196, 257, 530 n. 29 Double

articulation: and diagrammatic,

142-43; and stratification, 40-74 passim,

502-3. See also Content; Expression

Doyle, Arthur Conan: 40 Dream: and

multiplicity, 30; and

representation, 29-30. See also

Unconscious Dreiser, Theodore: 520 n.

18 Dreissche, T. van den: 549 n. 29 Drugs:

and perception, 282-86 Dualism: and

becoming, 276-77; and map

tracing, 13-14; and multiplicity, 20. See

INDEX □ 595

also Double articulation

Duby, Georges: 537 n. 19

Duccio: 185

Ducrot, Oswald: 77, 78, 80

Duhem, Pierre: 540 n. 29

Dumas, Alexandre: 250

Dumezil, Georges: 556 nn. 41, 43, 559 n.

67, 564 n. 8,565 n. 10; and

becoming-animal, 242-43; and State

apparatus, 351-52, 371, 424-26; and war

machine, 354

Duns Scotus, John: 540-41 n. 33

Dupouy, Roger: 532 n. 11, 540 n. 32

Dupreel, Eugene: and consistency, 328-29

Durkheim, Emile: 218-19, 376

Duvignaud, Jean: 237

Earth: and deterritorialization, 40; and

romanticism, 338-42. See also

Deterritorialization; Territory Ecce

Homo: 269 Ecumenon: and stratification,

50, 52, 55,

56, 72-73. See also Planomenon

Ego: Freudian, xviii. See also

Psychoanalysis; Self (Moi); Subjectivity

Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Irenaus: 547 n. 7, 548-49 n.

25, 550n.38 Eichendorff, Joseph: 550 n.

47 Einstein, Albert: 484, 501, 511

Eisenstein, Sergei: 413-14, 533 n. 10, 550

n. 48; and faciality, 184 Eliade, Mircea:

548 n. 18, 564 n. 2 Eliot, T. S.: 520 n. 18

Emmanuel, Arghiri: 568 n. 36, 569 n. 49

Emperaire, Jose: 557 n. 54 Engels,

Friedrich: 427, 566 n. 25, 568-69 n.

41 English: as major language, 102

Enunciation: and assemblage, 7, 22, 37;

and incorporeal transformation, 82-83;

and nomadology, 23; and order-word,

107; social character of, 79-80; subject

of, 129. See also Linguistics; Statement

Epistemology: and war machine, 361-74

passim. See also Concept; Idea;

Subjedification; Subjectivity; Thought

Erckmann, Emile: 246 Ernst, Max: and

faciality, 182 Esquirol, Jean: 119-20
Ethics: 153,257

Ethnology: and State apparatus, 429-30

Ethology: and consistency, 336

Euclid: and State science, 109, 364; and

striated space, 371, 489

Euclidean space: and multiplicity, 485-86;

and stratification, 47. See also

Geometry; Space

Evans-Pritchard, E. E.: 535 n. 3

Evolution: and becoming, 238-39; and

heterogeneity, 10-11; and representation,

10; and State apparatus, 429-31; and

stratification, 47-49

Exchange: and assemblage, 437-41; and

territory, 440. See also Capitalism

Experimentation: and body without

organs, 149-51, 161-62, 164; and

interpretation, 162

Expression: and abstract machine, 511-12;

and articulation, 44, 64; and assemblage,

88-89, 504-5; and block, 299; and

consistency, 329-33; and content, 43-45;

and deterritorialization, 87-89, 108-10,

307; and diagrammatic, 142-45; and

faciality, 179-80; and language, 85-91;

molar nature of, 57-58; and nomad

science, 369; and order-word, 108-9; and

regime of signs, 111,140-41; and sign,

117; and stratification, 43, 57, 60-73
passim, 502-3; and territory, 317-18; and

variation, 94. See also Content; Double

articulation; Form

Exteriority: and assemblage, 23; and

multiplicity, 9; and nomad thought,

xii-xii, 377; and stratification, 49-52,

57-58; and territory, 317-18; and war

machine, 24, 351-80 passim. See also

Interiority

Fabric: and smooth and striated space,

475-77

Faciality: and abstract machine, 168-70,

174-91 passim: and assemblage, 180-81;

and becoming, 292-93; and

becoming-animal, 176, 187; and body

without organs, 171-72; and Christ,

176-79, 182, 184-85, 187, 189; and

coding, 170; and deterritorialization,

61-62, 172, 174-91; and expression,

179-80; and language, 60-62; and line of

flight, 188; and multiplicity, 182-83; and

596 □ INDEX

refrain, 301; and rhizome, 190-91; and

schizoanalysis, 188;andsemiotic,

180-82; and sign, 117; and signifiance,

115-16, 179-82; and subjectification,

179-82. See also Body

Farachi, Armand: 23

Fascism: and capitalist axiomatic, 462-63;

and segmentarity, 214-15; and State

apparatus, 230-31; as suicidal State, 231.
See also State apparatus; Totalitarianism

Faulkner, William: 261, 292, 520 n. 18, 572

n.2

Faure, Elie: 413

Faye, Jean-Pierre: 82, 139, 536 n.l 1,

570-71 n. 62

Feminism: and deconstruction, xii; and

psychoanalysis, xi

Ferenczi, Sandor: and becoming-animal,

259

Fernandez, Dominique: 303-4, 307

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb: and State

philosophy, xii

Fiedler, Leslie: 282-83, 520 n. 18

Film: and becoming-animal, 233; and

faciality, 168, 172, 175, 184; and

movement, 281

Fitzgerald, F. Scott: 194, 198-200, 206,

229, 520 n. 18; and becoming, 248, 260,

279; and smooth space, 482

Flaubert, Gustave: 541 n. 39

Fleutiaux, Pierrette: 200-202

Flore, Joachim de: 530 n. 23

Flow: and book, 3-4; and capitalist

axiomatic, 468-69; and

deterritorialization, 11; and matter,

409-10; and nomads, 363, 404-15
passim; and segmentarity, 217-21,

225-26; and State apparatus, 448-49,

452-53, 456, 459-60. See also Line of

flight; Rhizome

Foch, Ferdinand: and war, 416

Focus: 291-92

Forbes, Robert James: 563 n. 103

Form: and abstract machine, 511; and

articulation, 41; and becoming-animal,

252-53; and classicism, 338; and content

and expression, 89; and intensity, 253;

and language, 85-86; and matter, 407-9;

of State, 448-60 passim; and

stratification, 43, 51-52, 54, 59-60, 60-73

passim; and variation, 95. See also

Content; Matter Fort-Da: and refrain,

299. See also Freud,

Sigmund; Psychoanalysis Fortes, Meyer:

535 n. 3, 536 n. 9 Foucault, Michel: xi,

xviii, 517 n. 8, 518 n.

20, 528 n. 5, 530-31 n. 39, 536-37 n. 16,

538 n. 1, 556 n. 44; and language, 66-67;

and nomad thought, xiii; and

order-word, 87; and power, xvii, 224; and

regime of signs, 140 Fourquet, Francois:

566 n. 16 Fractal: and multiplicity, 486-88.
See also

Mathematics; Number Fradin, Jacques:

566 n. 25 Francis, Saint: 178 Francis
Bacon: 518 n. 21 Francois I: 221-22

"Franglais": 102 Freud, Sigmund: 5, 14,

18, 29-30, 125,127,

241, 284, 519 n. 9, 541 n. 41, 544 n. 78;

and becoming-animal, 259; and body

without organs, 164; and multiplicity, 31;

and Wolf-Man, 26-38 passim. See also

Psychoanalysis Fried, Michael: 546

n. 89, 575 n. 38 Friendship theorem:

17 Fuller, J. F. C: 560

Gaelic: as minor language, 102

Galbraith, John Kenneth: 461, 524 n. 12

Galileo: 511

Galois, Evariste: 142

Game theory: and State apparatus, 352-53

Gardiner, Alan Henderson: 541 n. 40

Gaulle, Charles de: and May 1968, 216;

and State apparatus, 424-25 Gautier,

Emile Felix: 537 n. 23, 557 n. 57 Gavi,

Philippe: 274 Gay rights movement: and

psychoanalysis,

xi Genesis, Book of: 87. See also Bible,

the Genetics: and stratification, 53; and

language, 62-63 Genghis Khan: 226; and

war machine, 354,

392-93,417-19 Genseric: 226 Geoffrey

Saint-Hilaire, Etienne: 45-48, 55,

254-55, 542 n. 52 Geology:

and stratification, 40

INDEX □ 597

Geometry: and nomad science, 367; and

State apparatus, 212, 362-65. See also

Mathematics; Number; Space

Geroudet, Paul: 548 n. 22

Giotto: 178

Girard, Claude: 544 n. 78

Giscard d'Estaing, Valery: 216, 468

Glass, Philip: 542 n. 46

Glossalalie (Speaking in tongues): 96

Gluckman, Max: 558 n. 61

God: and body without organs, 150,

158-59; and book, 127; as cause, 3; in

East and West, 18; and prophetism,

123-24; and stratification, 40, 43-44, 58;

and subjectification, 128, 130. See also

Religion

Godard, Jean-Luc: 25, 97-98, 267; and

faciality, 172

Godelier, Maurice: 530 n. 33

Goethe, Johann von: 269, 540 n. 22, 542 n.

52; and Kleist, 268-69, 356; and smooth

and striated space, 482; and State

apparatus, 378; and war machine, 24

Golea, Antoine: 548 n. 11

Gordon, Pierre: 539 n. 21

Gorz, Andre: 215-16

Gould, Glenn: 8

Grammar: and language instruction, 75-76.

See also Language; Linguistics

Grammaticality: and homogeneity, 93-94;

and power, 101; and variation, 99

Gravity: and striated space, 370

Greimas, A. J.: 528 n. 6

Griaule, Marcel: 415, 521 ch. 3 n. 2

Griaznov, Mikhail: 430, 560 n. 73

Griffith, D. W.: and faciality, 175, 183, 184

Grohman, Will: 546 n. 92

Grousset, Rene: 394, 563 n. 105, 574 n. 30,

575 n. 37

Guattari, Felix: x-xi; and Deleuze, xi-xv

Guerin, Daniel: 214, 537 n. 24

Gueroult, Martial: 560 n. 77

Guerrero, Margarita: 539 n. 10

Guillaume, Gustave: 349, 541 n. 39

Guillerm, Alain: 571 n. 66

Guillerm, Daniele: 571 n. 66

Gulik, Robert van: 532 n. 14

Habermas, Jiirgen: 518 n. 18 Haeccity: and

assemblage, 262-63; and

becoming, 276-77, 280; and individual,

253; and linguistics, 263-65; and plane of

consistency, 266-72, 507; and

psychoanalysis, 264; and science, 369;

and subjectivity, 261-65. See also

Individual; Molecule

Haptic space: and nomad art, 492-99

Hardy, Thomas: 186-87, 332

Harmand, Jacques: 564 n. 8

Haudricourt, Andre: 18, 533 n. 12

Hegel, G. W E: 269, 556 n. 42; and

Deleuze's philosophy, x; and Kleist, 268,

356; and State, 385, 460

Heidegger, Martin: 125, 561 n. 85

Helioglobale: 158

Helmholtz, Hermann von: 573 n. 14

Herbert, Frank: 559-60 n. 70

Herzog, Werner: 110, 126

Hess, W. R.: 549 n. 29

Heterogeneity: and becoming, 250; and

consistency, 328-31; of language,

100-101; and nomad thought, xiii, 24,

361; and rhizome, 7-8; of social

formation, 435-37. See also Assemblage;

Consistency; Multiplicity; Plane of

consistency

Heusch, Luc de: 353, 528 n. 4, 543-44 n. 75

Heyting, A.: 570 n. 71

Hierarchy: and rhizome, 21

Hilbert, David: and diagrammatic, 143

Hincker, Francois: 569 n. 45

History: and memory, 295-96; natural, and

evolutionism, 233-34; and nomads,

23-24, 393-94; and segmentarity, 221-22;

and State apparatus, 23

Hitchcock, Alfred: 305

Hitler, Adolf: 214, 231

Hjelmslev, Louis: 523 n. 28, 526 n. 22, 531

n. 40; and content and expression, 108;

and double articulation, 45, 402; and

stratification, 43; and variation, 99

Hobbes, Thomas: and State apparatus, 357

Hocquenghem, Guy: 273

Hofmannsthal, Hugo von: and abstract

machine, 512; and becoming-animal,

240, 258, 275; and order-word, 110

Holderlin, Friedrich: 125, 268, 332, 507,

550 n. 47

Hoist, E. von: 549 n. 29

Holstein, Jonathan: 572 n. 3

598 □ INDEX

Homogeneity: of language, 92, 100-101;

and smooth and striated space, 488-89.

See also Consistency; Heterogeneity

Horticulture: East as, 18-19 Hubac,

Pierre: 382 Hugues-le-loup: 246 Human

beings: and art, 320-21, 498-99;

and becoming-animal, 238, 252-53;

enslavement of, 456-57; and faciality,

170-71, 190-91; and music, 309. See also

Man Humboldt, Wilhelm von: and

State

philosophy, xii Hume, David: as minor

philosopher, x Hunt: and war, 395-96

Husserl, Edmund: 192-93, 545 n. 85; and

geometry, 367; and formed matter,

407-8, 410; and multiplicity, 483

Hylomorphic model: see Matter, and form
Hyperion: 268

"I": and subjectification, 130. See also

Consciousness; Self (Moi); Subjectivity

IBM: and war machine, 403 Ibn Khaldun,

'Abd al-Rahman: 366, 481,

557 n. 51 Icon: and sign, 112; and

stratification, 65.

See also Index; Linguistics; Symbol

Idea: and resemblance, 235; and State

philosophy, xii; and war, 420. See also

Concept; Thought Identity: and State

philosophy, xii-xiii; and

subject and object, xi; and word, 28

Ideology: and assemblage, 4; and content

and expression, 68, 89-90

Iliad: 426

Illusion: and abstract machine, 63, 65

Immanence: and faith, 282; and line, 205;

and plane of consistency, 154, 266-67;

and pleasure, 156-57;and rhizome, 18,20

Immelmann, K.: 548 n. 24 Incorporeal

transformation: and language,

85; and order-word, 108-9. See also

Transformation Index: and sign, 112;

and stratification, 65.

See also Icon; Linguistics; Symbol

Individual: and form, 253, 254; and

haeccity, 261-62; and multiplicity, 254.

See also Haeccity Information: genetic,

10-11; and language,

75-76, 78-79, 85; and signifiance, 79. See
also Communication

Information science: 5, 16, 79, 179-80. See

also Computer science

Intensity: and assemblage, 4; and body

without organs, 31, 153, 157-58, 161,

164-65; and form, 253; and language,

109-10; and map, 15; and multiplicity,

33; and plane of consistency, 70; and

plateau, xiv, 22; and pleasure, 157. See
also Consistency; Plane of consistency

Interiority: and pleasure, 156-57; and State

philosophy, xii-xiii; and stratification,

49-52; and territory, 317-18; of thought,

377. See also Exteriority

Interpretation: and book, 127; and

experimentation, 162; and faciality, 115;

and signifiance, 114; and

subjectification, 138

"In the Cage": 195-98

Irigaray, Luce: xii

Irish English: 102

Isakower, Otto: 169

Isomorphy: and capitalist axiomatic,

464-66; and stratification, 46. See also

Form

"Jackals and Arabs": 37

Jackson, George: 204

Jacob, Francois: 10-11, 42, 62, 522 n. 15

Jacobs, Jane: 440, 565 n. 11

Jakobson, Roman: 531 n. 41

James, Henry: 195-98, 290, 329, 520 n. 18

Janequin, Clement: 300

Jargy, Simon: 547 n. 3

Jaspers, Karl: 556 n. 46

Jaulin, Robert: 533 n. 12

Jevons, W. Stanley: 437

Jewish people: and becoming, 291-92; as

subject, 128, 130. See also Bible, the;

Moses Joan of Arc: 176; and

becoming-woman, 277 Jones, LeRoi: 527 n.

39, 530 n. 34. See also

Black English Joset, Paul Ernst: 539 n.

11, 544 n. 77 Jouhandeau, Marcel: 530 n.

28 Jouissance: and body without organs,

154 Journet, Jean-Louis: 555 n. 30 Joyce,

James: 6, 53, 105, 127, 200, 209 Judgment:

and representational thinking,

INDEX □ 599

xi-xii. See also Aesthetics Julia,

Dominique: 527 n. 36 Julien, Florence:

202 Jung, Carl: 30, 235-36, 238, 241, 259,

411.

See also Freud, Sigmund; Psychoanalysis

Junger, Ernst: 403, 518 n. 3, 564 n. 6

Kafka, Franz: xvii, 15, 36, 37, 76, 97-98,

122, 225, 346, 520 n. 22, 529 n. 15,541

n. 44, 545 n. 84, 552 n. 5; and abstract

machine, 512; and assemblage, 88-89,

505; and becoming-animal, 243-44; and

bureaucracy, 4, 34, 214; and

deterritorialization, 306; and faciality,

169; and subjectification, 132; and

variation, 94; and war machine, 24

Kandinsky, Vasili: 295, 298, 575 n. 38

Kant, Immanuel: x, 367, 376, 417

Kaufmann, Arnold: 551 n. 54

Kerouac, Jack: 19,280

Kesey, Ken: 520 n. 18

Keynesian economics: and capitalist

axiomatic, 462

Kierkegaard, Suren: 197, 279, 281, 282,

376, 537 n. 17

Kings of the Road: 482

Kipling, Rudyard: 31

Klaatsch, Hermann: 533 n. 6

Klee, Paul: 295, 298, 303, 304, 310, 312,

337, 342, 344, 346, 347, 551 nn. 55, 58

Klein, Melanie: 13-14, 541 n. 41. See also

Freud, Sigmund; Psychoanalysis

Kleist, Heinrich von: and haeccity, 268;

and multiplicity, 9; and nomads, 378,

381; and plane of consistency, 507; and

rhizome, 25; and smooth and striated

space, 482; and war machine, 4, 24,

355-56, 400

Klossowski, Pierre: 131-32, 530 n. 28

Kojeve, Alexandre: 556 n. 42

Koran, the: and book, 127. See also

Mohammed; Religion

Kraepelin, Emil: 119

Krishna: and body without organs, 151. See

also Religion

Kristeva, Julia: 523 n. 27, 528 n. 8, 559-60

n. 70

La Boetie, Etienne de: 359

Labor: and smooth and striated space,

490-92; surplus, as apparatus of capture,

441-42. See also Capitalism; Capture;

Marx, Karl

Laborit, Henri: 535 n. 13

Labov, William: 93-94, 103, 524 nn. 7, 10,

526 n. 28

Lacan, Jacques: x, 26, 171, 529 n. 9, 543 n.

71. See also Psychoanalysis

Lacarriere, Jacques: 539 n. 20, 566 n. 21

La Casiniere, Joelle de: 520 n. 21

Lagache, Daniel: 529 n. 9

Laing, R. D.: x

Lalonde, Michel: 527 n. 37

Lamarck, Chevalier de: 522 n. 8

Land: and refrain, 347-48. See also

Territory

Landscape: and faciality, 172-73; and

music, 319; and refrain, 301

Language: and abstract machine, 148; and

deterritorialization, 61-63; and faciality,

60-62; and genetics, 62-63; and haeccity,

263-65; as heterogeneous reality,

100-101; and incorporeal

transformation, 82; and line, 202-3;

major and minor, 7-8, 101-10; and map

tracing, 77; and music, 95-97; philosophy

of, 86; and plane of consistency, 91; and

regime of signs, 140-41, 148; and speech,

78, 92; and State apparatus, 82-83,

429-30; and stratification, 60-70; and

subjectivity, 78. See also Coding;

Linguistics; Semiotic; Sign; Signifiance

Laplanche, Jean: 541 n. 41

Laroche, Emmanuel: 557 n. 51, 572 n. 12

Larouche, Jean Claude: 546 n. 98

Lautman, Albert: 485, 556 n. 39

Lautreamont, le Conte de: 236

Laviosa-Zambotti, Pia: 522 n. 14

Law: and science, 369-70. See also State

apparatus

Lawrence, D. H.: 186-87, 188-89, 197, 205,

244, 251-52, 276, 546 n. 90

Lawrence, T. E.: 563 n. 104

Leach, Edward: 246-47

League of Nations: and State apparatus, 435

Leaves of Grass: 19

Leclaire, Serge: and Wolf-Man, 26

Leeuw, Gerardus van der: 574 n. 29

Lelart, Michel: 536 n. 15

600 □ INDEX

Lenin, V. I.: 83, 100, 563 n. 108

Lenz, Friedrich Walther: 25, 378

Leroi-Gourhan, Andre: 60, 64, 302, 395,

407,475, 574 n. 33

Letter to Hitler: 163-64

Levi-Strauss, Claude: 112, 113, 209, 210,

236-37, 433, 539 n. 11, 541 n. 40

Lewin.Kurt: 152-53, 169

Libidinal economy: of West, xiv

Libido: and body without organs, 37; and

flow, 31; and machinic assemblage, 36;

and multiplicity, 31; and unconscious,

35. See also Desire; Psychoanalysis;

Sexuality

Lied von der Erde, Das (The song of the

earth): 339

Life of Saint Francis, The: 178

Ligers, Z: 539-40 n. 21

Limet, Henri: 561 n. 89

Lindon, Jerome: 529 n. 17

Lindqvist, N.: 527 n. 36

Line: and arborescent schema, 293-94; and

becoming, 279-80; and

becoming-animal, 245; and body without

organs, 203; and deterritorialization,

203-5; and diagrammatic, 144-45; and

language, 202-3; and map, 202-3; and

nomad art, 496-98; and novella,

195-202; and rhizome, 8, 21, 203, 505-6;

and schizoanalysis, 202-3; and

segmentarity, 9, 202-7, 209, 211-12, 217,

222-26; and smooth space, 478-79; and

State apparatus, 204; and

subjectification, 131-32. See also

Geometry; Line of flight; Plane; Space

Lineage: and organization, 388, 391-92;

and phylum, 406-7; State apparatus, 393

Line of flight: and assemblage, 88-89; and

becoming, 277; and book, 3-4; and

deterritorialization, 510; and faciality,

188; and map tracing, 14-15; and

multiplicity, 9, 32; and plane of

consistency, 270; and point, 298; and

rhizome, 9, 11,21; and signifying

regime, 116, 121-22; and stratification,

55; and subjectification, 133-34; and war

machine, 422-23; and writing, 24-25. See
also Deterritorialization; Line

Linguistics: 75-110 passim; and abstract

machine, 511-12; and arborescent

schema, 5; and content and expression,

90-91; and incorporeal transformation,

82; and power, 7-8, 18; and pragmatics,

85, 90-91, 97-98; and rhizome, 6-7; as

science, 100-110. See also Coding;

Language; Semiotic; Sign; Signifiance

Liszt, Franz: 319 Little Hans: 14, 256-59.
See also Freud,

Sigmund Lizot, Jacques: 176, 209,

535-36 n. 5 Logique du sens: x, 541
Logos: and nomos, 369-73; and State

apparatus, xiii Lombard, Maurice: 558 n.

60, 562 n. 97 Lorca, Federico: 261 Lorenz,

Konrad: 34, 239, 315-16, 547 n.

46, 548 nn. 9, 12,17,23 Lory, G. M.: 527

n. 38 Losey, Joseph: 291-92 Louis XIV:

558 n. 59 Love: and body without organs,

151; and

marginalism, 438-39; and

subjectification, 131-32, 134. See also

Desire; Sexuality Lovecraft, H. P.: 240,

245, 248, 251, 523 n.

32 Lowie, Robert: 113 Lowry,

Malcolm: 533 n. 8 Loyola, Ignacio

de: 533 n. 7 Luca, Gherasim:

97-98, 530 n. 32 Lucretius: x, 361,

489-90. See also

Democritus; Molecule Ludendorff,

Erich: 563 n. 108 Luke, Gospel according

to: 124. See also

Bible, the

Lulu: 184

Luther, Martin: 126 Luxemburg, Rosa:

537 n. 20 Lyotard, Jean-Francois: 518 n.

17,532 n. 14

Macciochi, Maria-Antonietta: 538 n. 32

Machine: and assemblage, 4, 343-44,

346-47; and capitalism, 456-59; and

consistency, 330-31; and diagrammatic,

141-48; and multiplicity, 34; and music,

343; and organ, 256; and segmentarity,

212-13; and social formation, 435-36; and

voice, 303-4, 307-8. See also Assemblage;

Multiplicity Machinic assemblage: and

body, 88-90; and

INDEX D 601

diagrammatic, 145; and enunciation, 7,

36-37; and multiplicity, 34; and

nomadology, 23; and plane of

consistency, 71-73; and power, 17; and

rhizome, 22; and stratification, 41-42,

56-57, 68. See also Assemblage;

Multiplicity

McLuhan, Marshall: 360

Mahler, Gustav: 339

Maldiney, Henri: 547 n. 32, 574 n. 31; and

nomad art, 493, 495

Mallarme, Stephane: 127, 346

Malmberg, Bertil: 101, 518 n. 2

Man: as molar entity, 292-93; white, and

faciality, 176-79. See also Human beings

Mandelbrot, Benoit: 486-87

Mann, Daniel: 233

Mann, Klaus: 230-31

Mann, Thomas: and music, 97

Mannerism: and territory, 320. See also

Painting

Manual de zoologiafantastica: 241

Mao Tse-tung: 5, 20, 226

Map: and body without organs, 163-64;

and line, 202-3; and regime of signs, 119;

and representation, 12; and rhizome,

12-15, 19-20; and segmentarity, 222; and

tracing, 12-15. See also Cartography;

Tracing

Marcel, Gabriel: 362

Mark, Gospel according to: 124. See also

Bible, the

Marshall, Alexander James: 550 n. 34

Marshall Plan: and capitalist axiomatic,

462

Martinet, Andre: 64, 528 n. 46, 530 n. 30

Martino, Ernesto de: 546 n. 97

Marx, Karl: 558 n. 61, 567 nn. 27-28,

31-32, 568 n. 34, 568-69 n. 41, 570 n. 59;

and book, 127; and capitalist axiomatic,

454, 463; and capture, 443; and State

apparatus, 427-28, 447-48; and

subjectivity, 453; and surplus value,

491-92. See also Capitalism; State

apparatus

Marxism: and major language, 105; and

State apparatus, xi

Masochism: and becoming-animal, 155-56,

260; and body without organs, 150, 152,

155-56

Mathematics: nomadic nature of, 24; and

smooth and striated space, xiii, 482-88.

See also Geometry; Number; Science

Matheson, Richard: 279, 540 n. 23 Matter:

and abstract machine, 511; and

body without organs, 43, 153; of book, 3;

and flow, 409-10; and form, 407-9; and

plane of consistency, 43, 45; and

stratification, 43. See also Form;

Substance Matthew, Gospel according to:

124. See

also Bible, the Maupassant,

Guy de: 193 Maurel, Christian:

543 n. 58 May 1968: and

philosophy, x; and

psychoanalysis, xi; and segmentarity, 216

Mayani, Zacharia: 529 n. 14 Mazaheri, A.:

561 n. 88 Mechanosphere: and

stratification, 71, 74 Meinong, A.: on

multiplicity, 32-33, 483 Mellaart, James:

565 n. 11 Melville, Herman: 186-89, 199,

205, 539 n.

15 Memory: and becoming, 291-98;

and

deterritorialization, 293-94; and line and

point, 293-98; and music, 295-98; and

rhizome, 15-16; and tracing, 16. See also

Epistemology; Thought Menaechmus:

and State science, 363 Meneur de loups:

250 Mephisto: 230-31 Mercier, Jacques:

533-34 n. 14 Messiaen, Olivier: 94, 300,

301, 304, 309,

316-17,320,551 nn. 51,57-58

Metallurgy: and flow, 410-11; and nomads,

404-15 passim. See also Flow; Science;

Technology Meunier, Jacques: 358

Meyer, Francois: 550 n. 40 Michaux,

Henri: 283, 285, 286 Michelet, Jules:

221-22 Micropolitics: 208-31 passim.
See also

Axiomatic; Molecule; Segmentarity;

State apparatus Milieu: definition of,

xvii; of rhizome, 21;

and rhythm, 313-16; of stratification,

49-52, 54-55; and territory, 317-18,

321-23 Miller, Arthur: 291-92 Miller,

Henry: 18-19, 147, 166, 186-87,

602 □ INDEX

248, 260, 276, 286, 482, 530 nn. 25, 31,

35, 533 n. 5, 546 n. 89, 551 n. 56

Millet, Jean Francois: 343

Millikan, Robert: 327

Milovanoff, Annie: 557 n. 49, 572 n. 6

Minority: and capitalist axiomatic, 469-73;

and language, 105-6

Minor literature: 105

Minor science: 108-9, 361-74 passim,

485-86

Moby-Dick: 243-45, 248-50, 304, 305

Mohammed: and nomads, 380, 383. See

also Koran, the; Religion

Moiroux, Jacques: 537 n. 20

Molecule: and articulation, 34; and

becoming, 248-50, 272-86 passim; and

deterritorialization, 345-46; and music,

308-9; and rhizome, 328-29; and

stratification, 45, 52, 57-60. See also

Becoming

Mondrian, Piet: 295, 301, 305, 546 n. 89

Monet, Claude: 298

Money: and capture, 442-43; and flow,

226-27. See also Capitalism

Monge, Gaspard: 363, 554 n. 28, 556 n. 36

Monod, Jacques: 49, 521 ch. 3 n. 3, 522 n.

21, 549 n. 30, 550 n. 41

Monsieur Zero: 279

Montesquieu: 564 n. 9

Montmollin, Robert: 570 n. 56

Morand, Paul: 279

More, Marcel: 304, 552 n. 60

Morgenstern, Laura: 574 n. 34

Moritz, Karl Philipp: 240, 512

Morphogenesis: and double articulation,

42. See also Form

Moses: 122-24, 226; and book, 127; and

nomads, 118, 383; as subject, 128, 130;

and taxation, 394; and war machine,

388, 390, 392-93, 417. See also Bible,

the; Religion

Moulier, Yann: 469, 527 n. 40, 571 n. 66

Movement: and becoming, 280-81; and

deterritorialization, 282, 326-27; and

nomads, 381; and plane of consistency,

281-82; and smooth and striated space,

498-99; and State apparatus, 386. See
also Slowness; Speed

Mozart, Wolfgang: 297, 304, 309, 350, 546

n. 92; and refrain, 300, 347

Mr. Klein: 291-292

Mrs. Dalloway: 263

Multiplicity: and arborescent schema,

16-17, 33; and assemblage, 8, 22-23, 34;

and becoming-animal, 239-52 passim;

and body without organs, 30, 154; and

book, 4-7; and crowd, 30, 33-34; and

evolution, 48-49; and faciality, 182-83;

and individual, 254; and intensity, 33;

and language, 66-67; and map, 15;

molecular, 27-28; and music, 11-12; and

nomad thought, xiii; and proper name,

37-38; and psychoanalysis, 34-35; and

rhizome, 6-9, 22, 30, 33, 505-6; and

smooth space and striated space, 371,

482-88; and stratification, 43, 52-53; and

unconscious, 35; and unity, 8-9, 32-33.
See also Assemblage; Consistency;

Machine; Plane of consistency

Mumford, Lewis: 428, 457, 570 n. 58

Murard, Lion: 566 n. 16

Music: and becoming, 299-309; and

consistency, 329-33, 343; and

deterritorialization, 296-97, 301-3; and

faciality, 186; and line of flight, 11-12;

and metallurgy, 411; and molecule,

308-9; and painting, 300-303; and plane

of consistency, 267, 270-72; and refrain,

347-50; and rhizome, 11-12; and smooth

and striated space, xiii, 477-78; and

subjectification, 137; and territory,

318-19; and variation, 95-97, 104. See
also Refrain

Musset, Lucien: 558 n. 62, 561 n. 83

Mussorgsky, Modest: 342, 550 n. 48; and

refrain, 300

M'uzan, Michel de: 531 n. 5

Myrdal, Gunnar: 571 n. 62

Myth: and becoming, 237

Napoleon: 47, 558 n. 59

NASA: and capitalism, 455

Nash, Paul: 546 n. 89

Nature: and multiplicity, 5, 254; and plane

of consistency, 266; and resemblance,

234-35. See also Spinoza, Baruch;

Substance Nef, John Ulric: 564 n. 109

Negri, Antonio: and capitalist axiomatic,

469

INDEX □ 603

Nelli, Rene: 532 n. 13

Nicolai, J.: 550 n. 37

Nietzsche, Friedrich: 23, 125, 227, 257,

296, 342-43, 345, 541 n. 44, 552 n. 5,

555 n. 35; and book, 6; and

deterritorialization, 510; and haeccity,

268, 269; as minor philosopher, x; and

nomad thought, xiii, 376-77; and power,

xvii; and plane of consistency, 507; and

refrain, 350

Nijinsky, Vaslav: 169,257

Noailles, Pierre: 565 n. 10

Nomadology: 315-423 passim; and history,

23-34; and stratification, 43

Nomads: and art, 492-99; and

deterritorialization, 53-54, 381-84; and

evolutionism, 48-49; and flow, 404-15
passim; and religion, 382-84; and

semiotic, 118; and smooth space, 380-81,

384-85, 410, 413-15, 474-500passim;

and State apparatus, 384-85, 430-31; and

war machine, 351-423passim. Seealso

Deterritorialization; Smooth space; War

machine

Nomad science: and royal science, 367-69,

373-74; and war machine, 361-74
passim. See also Pragmatics; Science

Nomos: and logos, 369-73; and nomad, xiii,

370-71, 380-81; and number, 388; and
polis, 353

Noology: and war machine, 374-80. See

also Thought

Novel: and faciality, 173-74; as literary

genre, 192-93

Novella: as literary genre, 192-207 passim

Number: and measurement, 8; and

multiplicity, 484-85; semiotic of, 118; and

war machine, 387-94. See also

Geometry; Mathematics

Numbers, Book of: 388. See also Bible, the

Object: and book, 3; in Western

metaphysics, xi. See also Epistemology;

Subjectivity

Omnes, Roland: 521 ch. 3 n. 1

"On Slogans": 83

"On the Gradual Formation of Ideas in

Speech" ("Uber die allmahliche

Verfertigung der Gedanken beim

Reden"): 378

Optical space: and nomad art, 493-99

Order-word: and content and expression,

108-9; and death, 107-8, 110; and

incorporeal transformation, 80-81,

108-9; and indirect discourse, 84; and

major and minor language, 106; and

sign, 87; and speech acts, 79; and

statement, 107; and variation, 94-95. See
also Linguistics

Oresme, Nicholas: 540 n. 29

Organ: and becoming-animal, 258-59; and

machine, 256. See also Body; Body

without organs

Organism: and assemblage, 4; and body,

41; and body without organs, 4, 30,

158-63; and double articulation, 41-42;

and faciality, 171-72; and nomad art,

498-99; and State apparatus, 366-67; and

stratification, 43-44, 50-54. See also

Body; Body without organs

Organization: see Stratification

Orgasm: as orientation of Western thought,

xiv, 22. See also Sexuality

Orient, the: as rhizome, 18-19; and State

apparatus, 384-85; 450-51

Orlando: 294.

Ortigues, Edmond: 564 n. 2

Oury, Jean: x

Overcoding: and language, 62; and novella,

200-201; and rhizome, 8-9; and

stratification, 63. See also Coding;

Language; Linguistics

Pacotte, Julien: 519 n. 13, 544 n. 82

Painting: and deterritorialization, 301; and

faciality, 172-73, 178-79, 184-85; and

line and point, 298; and memory, 295;

and music, 300-303; and refrain, 347-48.

See also Faciality Parain, Brice: 523 n. 4

Parain, Charles: 569 n. 43 Parant,

Jean-Luc: 534 n. 16 Pareto, Vilfredo: 439

Paris, Jean: 184-85 Parnet, Claire: 517 nn.

1,4 Pasolini, Pier Paolo: 106,523 n. 5,527n.

39 "Passionement" (Passionately): 98

Peirce, C. S.: 531 n. 41 Pelleas et
Melisande: 299 Pelliot, Paul: 561 n. 81

604 □ INDEX

Penthesilea: 355

Perrier, Edmond: 46, 255, 522 n. 8

Perronet, Jean: and State science, 363, 365

Petitot, Jean: 16-18, 544 n. 82

Phallogocentrism: as model of identity, xii

Phantasy: and body without organs, 151;

and psychoanalysis, 154-55

Philebus: 306

Philosophy: modern, 128, 342-43; and

nomad thought, x, xiii; and State

apparatus, ix-x, 375-76. See also Thought

Phylum: machinic, 409-10; and weapon,

406-7

Physics: and smooth and striated space,

488-92. See also Science

Pingaud, Bernard: 544 n. 79

Pinhas, Richard: 551 n. 53, 562 n. 94

Pink Panther. 11,25

Pirenne, Henri: 222

Pirou, Gaetan: 566 n. 24

Plane: definition of, xvii; and haeccity,

265-72 passim; of organization, 265-66.
See also Geometry; Line; Point; Space

Plane of consistency: and abstract machine,

70-73, 513-14; and becoming, 251-52;

and becoming-animal, 258-59; and body

without organs, 154-55, 158, 159,

165-66, 270, 506-8; and book, 4; of brain,

15; and deterritorialization, 70-71, 270,

272; and diagrammatic, 144-45; and

haeccity, 266-72; and intensity, 70; and

language, 65, 91, 109; and line of flight,

270; and map, 12; and machinic

assemblage, 71-73; and multiplicity, 9;

and music, 270-71; and regime of signs,

141-42; and rhizome, 21; and

stratification, 40, 49-50, 56-57, 69-73,

269-70; and subjectification, 134; and

war machine, 422-23; and writing,

268-69. See also Assemblage;

Consistency; Heterogeneity; Line;

Rhizome

Planomenon: and stratification, 50, 56, 73.

See also Ecumenon

Plateau: and body without organs, 158; and

book, ix; and chapter, 22; and rhizome,

21-22; and smooth space, xiv-xv. See also

Intensity; Nomads; Rhizome

Plato: xi, xii, 559 n. 66; and royal science,

361,369,475

Point: and arborescent schema, 293-94; and

line of flight, 298; and nomads, 380; and

rhizome, 8; of subjectification, 129. See
also Geometry; Line; Plane; Space

Politics: and axiomatics, 461; and language,

82-83, 100-110; and line, 204; and war,

419-21, 467. See also Axiomatic;

Capitalism; State apparatus

Pollock, Jackson: 546 n. 89, 575 n. 38

Polyvocality: and faciality, 179-81

Pompidou, Georges: and May 1968, 216;

and State apparatus, 424-25

Poncelet, Jean: 363, 554 n. 23

Pontalis, J.-B.: 541 n. 41, 544 n. 79

Popelin, Claude: 522 n. 18

Population: and deterritorialization,

345-46; and stratification, 52-53. See also

Crowd; Multiplicity

Portes du paradis, Les: 23-24

Poststructuralism: and State philosophy,

xi-xii

Potemkin: 184

Pottier, Rene: 560 n. 72

Pound, Ezra: 105, 176, 200, 520 n. 18

Power (pouvoir): arborescent structure, of,

17; definition of, xvii; and faciality, 175;

and language, 7, 75-76, 95, 101, 105-6;

and minor philosophy, x; and

psychoanalysis, x-xi; and segmentarity,

224-27; and State apparatus, 227,

431-32. See also State apparatus

Power (puissance): and capitalist axiomatic,

466-67; definition of, xvii; and faciality,

175; and language, 95, 106; and war

machine, 392. See also Consistency; War

machine

Pragmatics: and becoming, 251; generative

and transformational, 139-40; and

incorporeal transformation, 82-83; and

language, 77-78, 92; and linguistics, 85,

90-91, 97-98; and map, 15, 146-47; and

nomad thought, xiii; as schizoanalysis,

146; and State philosophy, xv; and

stratification, 43. See also Nomad

science; Schizoanalysis

Preaux, Claire: 563 n. 106

Primitive society: and segmentarity,

209-13; and State apparatus, 357-61,

429-31, 433. See also Evolution

Princesse de Cleves, La: 173-74

INDEX D 605

Prison: and language, 66-67

Proclus: 554

Profit: as apparatus of capture, 441-42. See

also Capitalism

Proper name: and abstract machine, 142;

and body without organs, 35; and

haeccity, 263-64; and intensity, 27-28;

and multiplicity, 27-28, 37-38; and

order-word, 84; and variation, 100; of

Wolf-Man, 26-27. See also Subjectivity

Property: and deterritonalization, 388; and

State apparatus, 428, 449. See also

Capitalism

Propp, Vladimir: 194

Proust, Marcel: 196, 266, 358, 526 n. 27,

541 n. 39, 542 n. 47, 545 n. 84, 548 nn.

15, 19, 550 n. 46; and becoming-woman,

277; and deterritonalization, 306; and

faciality, 185-86; and haeccity, 271-72;

and marginalism, 438-39; and music,

319; and proper name, 37; and refrain,

347; and secret, 290; and variation, 98

Proust and Signs: 518 n. 25, 526 n. 27

Psychanalyse et transversalit'e: 517 n. 10

Psychiatry: and delusion, 119-21, 128

Psychoanalysis: and arborescent schema,

17-18; and becoming-animal, 259-60; and

body without organs, 151, 165; and

causality, 283-84; and haeccity, 264; and

multiplicity, 34-35, 38; and phantasy,

154-55; and politics, x-xi; as priesthood,

154-55; and schizoanalysis, 17-18; and

secret, 288-89; semioticof, 125; and

subjectification, 130-31; as tracing,

12-15. See also Freud, Sigmund;

Schizoanalysis; Unconscious

Public sphere: and private property, 451-52

Quebecois: as minor language, 101-2, 104

Querrien, Anne: 364-66,556 n. 36,573 n. 24

Quinet, Edgar: 452

Race: and faciality, 178; and nomad

thought, 379-80. See also Man

Ravel, Maurice: 270-71 Ray, Jean:

29, 569 n. 50 Reality: and

representation, 23; and

subjectification, 129-30. See also

Epistemology Reason: as law,

xii-xiii; and State

apparatus, 375-76

Recherches: 517 n. 11

Refrain: 310-50 passim; and assemblage,

312, 323-27; and becoming, 350; and

deterritonalization, 300-302; and music,

299-302; and plateau, xiv-xv; and

territory, 317, 321. See also Music

Regime of signs: and abstract machine,

141-42; and assemblage, 119, 121-22,

140-41; authoritarian and despotic,

121-22; and deterritonalization, 141-43,

508; and enunciation, 7; and incorporeal

transformation, 88; and map, 119; and

order-word, 83-84; and plane of

consistency, 141-42; and rhizome, 21;

and semiotic, 11, 136; and stratification,

63, 68; and subjectification, 130. See
also Language; Linguistics; Semiotic;

Sign

Regis, Emmanuel: 529 n. 11

Regnault, Francois: 526 n. 32

Reich, Steve: 542 n. 46

Reich, Wilhelm: 534 n. 22

Reinberg, A.: 549 n. 29

Religion: and State apparatus, 382-84; and

territory, 321-22

Rent: as apparatus of capture, 440-41

Representation: and arborescent schema,

12; and assemblage, 23; and body, 86;

and book, 5-7; and heterogeneity, 10

Reterritorialization: see

Deterritonalization

Reuleaux, Franz: 457

Revel, Jacques: 527 n. 36

Revolution moleculaire, La: 517-18 n. 12

Rhizome: as antigenealogy, 10-11, 21; and

arboresent schema, xii, 6-7, 20, 34,

328-29, 506; and becoming, 25, 238-39,

294; and book, 6-7, 11, 22-23; and

evolution, 10-11; and faciality, 190-91;

and language, 109-10; and line, 203,

505-6; and linguistics, 7-8, 91, 92; and

map, 20; and multiplicity, 6-9, 30, 505-6;

and nomads, 415; and novella, 199; and

segmentarity, 211; and smooth and

striated space, 371, 506; and

stratification, 53, 74; and

subjectification, 134; as unconscious, 18;

and variation, 95-96; and writing, 24-25.
See also Arborescent schema; Flow;

606 □ INDEX

Nomads; Plane of consistency Rhythm."

and consistency, 328-29; and

milieu, 313-16; and refrain, 313-14; and

territory, 318-20. See also Music

Ricardo, David: 567 nn. 27-28, 30-31

"Rideau cramoisi, Le": (The crimson

curtain): 193 Riegl, Alois: 574 n. 32;

and nomad art,

492-93, 495 Riemann, Georg: 142,

573 n. 16; and

multiplicity, 32, 482-83 Riemannian

space: 476, 485-86. See also

Geometry; Space Rimbaud, Arthur:

379 Riviere, Jacques: Artaud's

correspondence

with, 377-78 Robert, Jean: 565 n. 11,

568 n. 40 Romanticism: and territory,

338-42 Ronai, Maurice: 533 n. 13

Rorschach test: and faciality, 180 Rose,

Steven: 519 n. 12 Rosenstiehl, Pierre:

16-18, 544 n. 82 Rossini, Gioacchino:

307 Roth, Karl Heinz: 571 n. 66 Rouget,

Gilbert: 526 n. 29 Rousseau,

Jean-Jacques: 81-96 Roussel, Raymond:

288-89 Rovini, Robert: on Holderlin, 268

Royal science: and nomad science, 367-68,

373-74. See also Science; State

apparatus "Ruse, Une" (An

artifice): 193 Rush, J. H.: 522 n. 12

Russell, Bertrand: and logic, 148; and

multiplicity, 33, 483 Ruwet, Nicolas:

99 Ruyer, Raymond: 332, 521 ch. 3 n. 3,

550

n. 36 Ryan, Michael: 571

n. 66

Sadock, J. M.: 525 n. 22 Sahlins,

Marshall: 573 n. 25 Saint-Geours,

Jean: 569-70 n. 52 Salle, J. B. de la:

533 n. 7 Samson, Joseph: 547 n. 3

Samuel, Claude: 548 n. 13 Sarraute,

Nathalie: 196-97,267 Sartre,

Jean-Paul: and faciality, 171 Saumjan,

S. K.: 525-26 n. 22 Saussure,

Ferdinand de: 524 n. 7

Scherer, Rene: 273

Schizoanalysis: and abstract machine, 513;

and becoming, 251; and body without

organs, 165; and faciality, 188; and line,

202-3; and map, 13; and nomad thought,

xiii; and pragmatics, 146; and

psychoanalysis, 17-18; and stratification,

43. See also Pragmatics; Psychoanalysis

Schleiermacher, August: xii

Schmitt, Bernard: 445-46, 536 n. 14, 567 n.

Schnebel, Dieter: 96

Schoenberg, Arnold: and refrain, 350

Schopenhauer as Educator: 376

Schreber, Daniel Paul: 5, 120, 288-89, 531

n. 3

Schumann, Robert: 270, 297-98, 304,

307-8, 550 n. 47; and refrain, 300, 303,

347, 350

Schwob, Marcel: 23-24

Science: and assemblage, 22-23; and

axiomatic, 461; and deterritorialization,

372; and diagrammatic, 143-44; major

and minor, 108-9, 361-74; and nomads,

24. See also Mathematics; Nomad

science; Technology

Searle, John: 524 n. 9

Secret: and content and form, 286-89; and

line, 205; and novella, 193-94, 196-97;

and paranoia, 288-89; and perception,

286-87; and sexuality, 289-90; and war

machine, 287-88

Sedentary: and nomad, 414-15

Segmentarity: and coding, 222-24; and

deterritorialization, 222-24; and line,

206-7, 209, 211 -12, 217, 222-26; and line

of flight, 216, 223-24; molar and

molecular, 213, 215-17, 224-25, 228; and

novella, 195-202; and rhizome, 211;

rigid, 212; and State apparatus, 218,

222-27; supple, 213. See also

Consistency; State apparatus;

Stratification; Striated space

Self (Moi): definition of, xvii-xviii; and

order-word, 84; and subjedification,

132, 133; and war machine, 356. See also

Subjectivity

Semantics: and speech acts, 77-78. See also

Linguistics

Semiology: and regime of signs, 111-12.

INDEX □ 607

See also Language; Linguistics; Sign;

Signifiance

Semiotic: and deterritorialization, 135; and

faciality, 180-82; and regime of signs,

136; and State apparatus, 135;

transformation of, 136-39. See also

Language; Linguistics; Regime of signs;

Sign; Signifiance

Sephiha, Vidal: 527 n. 35

Serieux, Paul: 119-20

Serres, Michel: 361, 371-72, 489-90, 519 n.

13, 554 n. 24, 555 n. 32

Sexuality: and becoming, 246, 275-79; and

rhizome, 18. See also Desire; Love

Shakespeare, William: 125-26, 354

Shestov, Leon: 206, 376

Shrinking Man: 279

Sign: and assemblage, 504; and book, 4;

and content and expression, 117; and

deterritorialization, 67-68, 87, 112-13,

115-17, 121; and faciality, 123; and

order-word, 87; and signifiance, 112;

signifying regime of, 112; and State

apparatus, 118; and stratification, 64-69;

and thing and word, 66-67; and tool,

400-402. See also Language; Linguistics;

Regime of signs; Semiotic; Signifiance

Signature: and territory, 316

Signifiance: and abstract machine, 91; and

arborescent schema, 16; and body

without organs, 159-61; definition of,

xviii; and faciality, 179-82; and

information, 79; and interpretation, 114;

and regime of signs, 68; and

subjectifi-cation, 167-68; and writing, 22.
See also Language; Linguistics; Semiotic;

Sign

Signified: see Sign

Signifier: see Sign

Simmel, Georg: 544 n. 76

Simondon, Gilbert: 408-10, 522 nn. 11, 19,

523 n. 31, 555 n. 33

Simpson, George Gaylord: 522 n. 10

Sin: and segmentarity, 218

Sinacoeur, Hourya: 551 n. 54

Sirens: 308

Slepian, Vladimir: and becoming-animal,

258-60, 274

Slowness: and form, 254; and science,

371-72; and stratification, 56. See also

Movement; Speed

Smith, Patti: 19

Smooth space: and aesthetics, 492-99; and

body without organs, 479; and

capitalism, 490-92; and minor science,

361-62; and multiplicity, 482-88; and

nomads, 380-81,384-85, 410,413-15;

and number, 389; and thought, xiii,

379-80; and plateau, xiv-xv; and

rhizome, 506; and State apparatus,

489-92; and striated space, 353, 369-73,

387, 474-500 passim; and war machine,

363-64, 422-23, 489-92. See also

Consistency; Nomads; Plane of

consistency; Rhizome; Space; Striated

space

Society: and segmentarity, 208-31 passim.

See also Politics; State apparatus

Solomon: 122, 123, 534 n. 14. See also

Bible, the; Jewish people

Solon: 557 n. 51

Songs and Dances of Death: 300

"Son of Sam": 80

Sorcery: and becoming-animal, 239-52

passim

Space: and haeccity, 261-63; holey, 413-15;

and refrain, 311-12; and State apparatus,

388-89. See also Geometry; Smooth

space; Striated space

Spaier, Albert: 573 n. 15

Speech: and action, 77-78; and language,

78, 92. See also Language; Linguistics

Speed: and becoming-animal, 258-59; and

body, 260-61; and book, 3-4; and form,

254; and haeccity, 261-62; and nomads,

381, 499; and plane of consistency,

270-71; and science, 371-72; and State

apparatus, 386; and stratification, 56.
See also Movement; Slowness

Speed: 152

Spengler, Oswald: 76

Spinoza, Baruch: x, xiii, xvi, 123, 153-54,

158, 253-54, 256-57, 260-61, 507

Spinozism: 253-60

Spirit: Hegelian, and Cosmos, 342

Spitz, Rene: 169-70

Ssu-ma Ch'ien: 559 n. 69

Stalin, Joseph: 525 n. 21

Stalinism: and segmentarity, 214-15. See

also State apparatus; Totalitarianism

Starobinski, Jean: 552 n. 10

608 D INDEX

State apparatus: and abstract machine,

223; and assemblage, 513; and

axiomatic, 460-73 passim; and

becoming-animal, 242-43, 247-48; and

book, 24; and capitalism, 434-35,

452-59; and capture, 444-45; and coding,

434, 448-51, 459-60; and consistency,

431-32, 434-35; and deterritorialization,

432-34; and flow, 448-49, 452-53,

459-60; form of, 448-60 passim; and

history, 23; and line, 204; and nomads,

384-85; and number, 388-94; and

philosophy, ix-xii, 375-76; poles of,

424-26; and power, 227; and primitive

society, 357-61; and religion, 382-84; and

segmentarity, 208-31 passim; and sign,

116-18, 135; and smooth and striated

space, 385-87,489-92; and social

formation, 435-37; and stratification,

68-69, 433; and subjectivity, 375-76,

460; and thought, 24; and violence,

447-48; and war machine, 24, 229-31,

351-423 passim, 416-27, 430-31; and

writing, 401-2. See also Axiomatic;

Capitalism; Nomads; Stratification;

Striated space; War machine

Statement: and action, 77, 79, 86;

definition of, xviii; and order-word, 107;

and speech act, 79; subject of, 129. See
also Enunciation; Linguistics

Sternberg, Josef von: 532 n. 1

Stockhausen, Karlheinz: 266,342,551 n. 53

Stoics: and incorporeal transformation, 86

"Story of the Abyss and the Spyglass, The":

200-202

Stratification: 40-74 passim; and

assemblage, 503-5; and body without

organs, 159-63; and book, 3-4; and

consistency, 335-37; and content and

expression, 502-3; and diagrammatic,

142-45, 148; and plane of consistency,

269-70; and State apparatus, 433; and

subjectification, 134. See also

Segmentarity; State apparatus; Striated

space

Stravinsky, Igor: 545 n. 87

Striated space: and aesthetics, 492-99; and

capitalism, 490-92; and minor science,

361-62; and multiplicity, 482-88; and

rhizome, 506; and smooth space, 353,

369-73, 413-15, 474-500 passim; and

State apparatus, xiii, 385-87, 489-92; and

thought, 379-80; and war machine,

489-92. See also Nomads; Smooth space;

Space; State apparatus; Stratification

Strike: 413-14

Strindberg, August: 115, 132, 278

Structuralism: and binary logic, 5; and

resemblance, 235-36; and rhizome, 12.
See also Linguistics

Structure: and linguistics, 92-101

Subjectification: and abstract machine,

134; and arborescent schema, 16; and

body without organs, 134, 159-61; and

deterritorialization, 133, 134; and

faciality, 179-82; and interpretation, 138;

and line of flight, 134; and plane of

consistency, 134; and postsignifying

regime, 119; and regime of signs, 130,

132-33; and signifiance, 167-68; and

stratification, 134; and writing, 22. See
also Signifiance

Subjectivity: and assemblage, 264-65; and

book, 3-4; and capitalism, 456-59; and

haeccity, 261-65; and language, 78; and

multiplicity, 8-9; and property, 451-53;

and representation, 23; and State

apparatus, 375-76, 460; and State

philosophy, xii-xiii; and thought, 379-80;

in Western metaphysics, xi

Substance: and abstract machine, 511; and

articulation, 41; and body without

organs, 153-54; and form, 43; and

stratification, 43, 52. See also Form;

Matter; Spinoza, Baruch

Sue, Eugene: 358

Swann's Love (L'Amour de Swann): 185-86

Symbol: and sign, 112, and stratification,

65. See also Icon; Index; Linguistics

Synge, J. M.: 526 n. 32

Synthesizer: and language, 109; and

machine, 343; and musical variation,

95-96. See also Music

Sznycer, Evelyne: 548 n. 16

Szondi test: and faciality, 180

Tale: as literary genre, 192-95

Tales of Power: 162

Tamerlane: and war machine, 419

Tao: and pleasure, 157. See also Religion

INDEX □ 609

Tarahumaras, Les: 158

Tarde, Gabriel: 216, 218-19, 548 n. 10, 575

n. 34

Taxation: as apparatus of capture, 442-43;

and number, 394. See also Money; State

apparatus

Technology: and stratification, 60-61; and

weapon, 404-7. See also Science

Tel Quel: xi

Territory: and art, 316-17, 320-21; and

assemblage, 323-27, 332-34, 503-5; and

coding, 322; and expression, 317-18; and

milieu, 317-18, 321-23; and multiplicity,

33; and novella, 195; and organization,

388-89; and refrain, 312, 317, 321; and

rhythm, 314-16, 320; and segmentarity,

212-13; and stratification, 40, 53-57; and

substance, 41; and war machine, 419. See
also Deterritorialization

Tetry, Andre: 547 n. 101

Theology: and becoming-animal, 252-53.

See also Religion

Thesiger, Wilfred: 557 n. 55-56, 572 n. 7

Third World: and capitalist axiomatic, 465,

468-69

Thorn, Rene: 481, 539 n. 16

Thorpe, W. H.: 333, 548 n. 8, 550 n. 33

Thought: and arborescent schema, 15-17;

and smooth and striated space, 379-80;

and State apparatus, 374-80; and

subjectivity, 379-80; and war machine,

376-78

Timaeus: 361, 369

Time: and haeccity, 261-63; and literary

genre, 193-94

Time and Free Will: 483

Tinbergen, Nikolaas: 327

Titian: and faciality, 173

Titorelli, Painter: 529 n. 15

To Be Done with the Judgment of God: 163

Todaro,G.J.: 10

Tokei, Ferenc: 449, 565 n. 9

Tool: and machinic assemblage, 90; and

sign, 400-402; and State apparatus,

400-403; and stratification, 60-61; and

weapon, 395-403. See also Technology

Totalitarianism: and capitalist axiomatic,

462; and segmentarity, 214-15; and State

apparatus, 230-31. See also Fascism;

State apparatus

Tournier, Michel: 261

Town: and State apparatus, 432-34. See

also City Toynbee, Arnold J.: and

nomads, 381, 482 Tracing: and arborescent

schema, 20; book

as, 24; and map, 12-15; and rhizome,

12-15. See also Map Transfiguration,

The: 178 Transformation: analogical,

136-37; and

becoming, 250-53; incorporeal, 80-83,

85-88; and pragmatics, 139-40. See also

Incorporeal transformation

Translation: and multiplicity, 486; of

semiotic, 136-39; 486; and stratification,

62-63. See also Language Tree:

see Arborescent schema Trial,
The: xvii

Tronti, Mario: 571 n. 66, 571-72 n. 67

Troyes, Chretien de: 174, 533 n. 8

Troyes, Garin de: 364 Trudaine: 365

Truffaut, Francois: 546 n. 96 TV: and

machinic enslavement, 458. See

also Technology

Typee: 188-89

Uexkull, Jacob von: 51, 257, 315

Unconscious: and arborescent schema, 18;

and body without organs, 30; and

causality, 284; and multiplicity, 29-32, 35;

and pack, 35; and resemblance, 235; as

rhizome, 12-15, 18. See also Freud,

Sigmund; Psychoanalysis "Unconscious,

The": 27-28 United Nations: and State

apparatus, 435 Universal History of Infamy,
A: 241

Vallier, Dora: 575 n. 38

Varese, Edgar: 309, 343, 344, 551 n. 56

Variation: and abstract machine, 511-12;

and deterritorialization, 99; in language,

93-95, 97-100; and matter, 408-9; and

minor language, 101-10; and royal

science, 369-70. See also Constant;

Linguistics

Varron: 565 n. 10

Vauban, Marquis de: 363

Vendryes, Pierre: 521 n. 3

Verdi, Giuseppe: 307-8, 341-42

Vergez, Raoul: 554 n. 3

610 a INDEX

Vergopoulos, Kostas: 570 n. 53

Vermeer, Jan: 347

Vernant, Jean-Pierre: 236, 536 n. 7, 543 n.

61, 559 n. 66, 564 nn. 7-8, 573 n. 21, 574

n. 29

Veyne, Paul: 569 n. 44

Vialleton, Louis: 46-47

Vidal-Naquet, Pierre: 565 n. 9

Virilio, Paul: 231, 395-96, 520-21 n. 24,

536 nn. 8, 12, 554 n. 22, 564 n. 10; and

capitalist axiomatic, 462; and

deterritorialization, 345; and smooth

space, 480; and State apparatus, 212,

386-87; and war machine, 467

Visage (Face): 96, 302

Vivier,Odile:551n. 52

Vladimirtsov, Boris: 394, 560 n. 71

Vuillard, Jean Edouard: 175

Vuillemin, Jules: 573 n. 14

Wagenbuch, Klauss: 527 n. 39

Wagner, Richard: 127, 142, 269, 270,

307-8,319,341-42

Wahl, Jean: 526 n. 32

War: and capitalism, 421, 466, 467; and

hunt, 395-96; and politics, 467; and war

machine, 416-23. See also State

apparatus

War machine: and assemblage, 406-7, 513;

and becoming, 277-78; and

becoming-animal, 242-43, 247-48, 396;

and body, 366-67; and capitalist

axiomatic, 466-67, 471-73; and

diagrammatic, 144; and line of flight,

422-23; and nomads, 351-423 passim;

and plane of consistency, 422-23; and

religion, 383-84; and secret, 287-88; and

segmentarity, 218, 222-27; semiotic of,

118; and smooth and striated space,

363-64, 422-23, 489-92; and State

apparatus, 24, 229-30, 351-427 passim,

430-31; and thought, 376-78. See also

Nomads; Smooth space; State apparatus

Watt, W. Montgomery: 557 n. 50

Waves, The: 252, 513

Weapon: and nomads, 403-15 passim; and

tool, 395-403. See also Technology; War

Weber, Max: 556 n. 42 Webern, Anton

von: 142, 511 Weinreich, U.: 7 Wenders,

Wim: 482 What Maisie Knew: 290 White,

Kenneth: 379 White, Lynn Townsend, Jr.:

560 n. 79, 561

n. 86 White wall: and faciality,

167-91; and

signifiance, 167-68. See also Black hole

Wilf, Herberts.: 519 n. 14 Will, Edouard:

442, 568 n. 35 Will to Power, The: 269
Willard: 233, 243 William the Conqueror:

19 Wilson, Robert: 98 Wittfogel, Karl: 19,

363, 565 n. 9 Wolf-Man, the: 26-38 passim,

239, 249,

250. See also Freud, Sigmund Wolfson,

Louis: 273 Woolf, Virginia: 29, 239, 252,

263, 276-77,

280, 294, 329 Worringer, Wilhelm: 411,

575; and nomad

art, 415, 492-93, 495-99 Wozzeck: 339

Writing: and abstract machine, 65; and

becoming-animal, 240; and

deterritorialization, 11; and dualism, 20;

and measurement, 4-5; and memory, 16;

and nomad art, 497; and plane of

consistency, 268-69; and rhizome, 23*25;

and State apparatus, 401-2; and

subjectification, 22. See also Book;

Language Wunderlich, Dieter: 519 n. 11,

525 n. 22,

526 n. 24

Yoga: and body without organs, 151

Young, La Monte: 344

Zavin, Fanny: 543 n. 64

Zola, Emile: 523 n. 2

Illustrations

Sylvano Bussoti, Five Pieces for Piano for David Tudor. By permission of

Photo Boyer, Wolf Tracks on Snow. Viollet Collection.

Photo Boyer, Lobster. Collection Viollet.

Fritz Lang, The Testament of Doctor Mabuse (bullet-ridden dummie of

Dr. Mabuse).

The Ark of the Covenant with the Column of Fire and the Cloud. Musee

des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, Viollet Collection.

111

M. Griaule and G. Dieterlan, The Pale Fox. Institut d'ethnologie,

Musee de l'Homme, Paris (the first Yala of Amma's egg).

149

Duccio, The Calling of Saint Peter and Saint Andrew. Bulloz Collection,

New York.

167

Faces from Jacques Mercier, Rouleaux magiques ethiopiens. Seuel. 183
R. F. Outeceault, Buster Brown, le petit facteur. Librairie Hachette. 192
Fermand Leger, Men in the Cities, 1919. Copyright 1987 by ARS,

N.Y./SPADEM.

208

Wolf-Man, Cerveteri Etruscan Amphora. Musee du Louvre, Paris. Photo

by Chuzeville.

232

Etruscan Plate. Etruscan National Museum, Rome.

232

Paul Klee, Twittering Machine, 1922. Water color, pen and ink, I6V4 x

12". Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

310

Drawing of a Wooden Chariot. Hermitage Museum, Leningrad.

351

Chomel, Dictionnaire economique, 1732. Entry for "Perdrix" Partridge. 424
Crazy in Stripes, Vermont 1865. From Jonathan Holstein, American

Pieced Quilts (New York: Viking, 1973).

474

Computer Einstein.

501